Current Affairs Quiz 10 August 2026

NSM traces India’s HPC self-reliance strategy back to PARAM 8000 (1991), built by C-DAC after the US denied India export access to a Cray supercomputer over dual-use/non-proliferation concerns. NSM (2015, MeitY and DST, about Rs 4,500 crore outlay) built a network of facilities from 50-teraflop systems to multi-petaflop machines across IITs, NITs, IISc and national labs, with C-DAC Pune and IISc Bengaluru as its two implementing agencies.
Landmark installations include PARAM Shivay (2019, IIT BHU, the first NSM system) and PARAM Pravega (2022, IISc, about 3.3 petaflops). Param Pragya extends this AI-focused HPC network into IIT Delhi’s expansion campus.
It sits alongside the separate IndiaAI Mission (Cabinet-approved March 2024, about Rs 10,372 crore), whose Common Compute Facility subsidises GPU access for start-ups and researchers, targeting 100,000 GPUs by end-2026.

The JAM trinity, Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar identity, and Mobile-linked verification, underpins India’s Direct Benefit Transfer architecture across welfare schemes, from LPG subsidy transfer to MGNREGA wages. Maharashtra’s Karjmafi Yojana (Cabinet-approved June 2, 2026; Rs 36,585 crore outlay; about 56 lakh farmers) waives short-term crop loans up to Rs 2 lakh taken between April 2019 and March 2025, overdue as of September 30, 2025.
It contrasts with the Centre’s 2008 Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme (3.73 crore farmers, Rs 52,259.86 crore), which the Comptroller and Auditor General later flagged for implementation flaws in bank-routed disbursal. DBT-based delivery is presented as reducing leakage and processing delay, though it introduces new bottlenecks around Aadhaar seeding and cross-department data-sharing, such as Income Tax records used to screen out ineligible taxpayer-farmers.

India’s framework for foreigners rests on four linked statutes: the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 (entry documentation); the Registration of Foreigners Act, 1939 (mandatory registration); the Foreigners Act, 1946 (the principal deportation-power statute, Section 3); and the Citizenship Act, 1955 (determination of citizenship status, including provisions like Section 6A for Assam). The Foreigners Regional Registration Office, under the Ministry of Home Affairs, is the nodal authority for visa extension, registration and deportation.
Operation Mukta (Bengaluru, August 8, 2026) detained nearly 1,950 people across the Whitefield and Electronic City divisions to confirm just 19 as Bangladeshi nationals, illustrating both the statutory machinery in action and the due-process concerns that accompany large verification drives.

Ethics in governance requires balancing the state’s legitimate security and administrative aims against the rights and dignity of individuals subject to state action. The proportionality principle, drawn from Indian administrative and constitutional law and applied by courts in cases involving personal liberty, asks whether an intrusive measure is suitable, necessary (no less-restrictive alternative available), and balanced against the harm caused.
In law-enforcement verification drives, due-process safeguards, time-bound detention, trained personnel who can distinguish valid-but-unfamiliar documents from forged ones, prompt release of confirmed citizens, and protection against linguistic profiling (as flagged for Bengali-speaking migrant workers in past drives elsewhere), operationalise this principle. GS4 case studies often test whether an administrator would prioritise efficient enforcement or individual dignity when the two appear to conflict.

The Su-30MKI is the IAF’s largest fighter fleet by squadron count, born from a November 1996 agreement worth about $1.46 billion with Sukhoi and the India-specific “MKI” variant, which pairs a Russian airframe and engine with French and Israeli avionics. Licensed production ran through Irkut Corporation and HAL’s Nashik division from the early 2000s, ultimately building 222 aircraft, HAL’s largest production undertaking.
The IAF’s sanctioned strength of 42 squadrons dates to two-front-war planning; actual strength has fallen to roughly 29-31 after MiG-21 retirements, the lowest since 1965. The 12-jet replacement contract (Rs 11,000 crore, December 2024, deliveries by 2029) is distinct from HAL’s separate roughly Rs 60,000 crore “Super Sukhoi” fleet-upgrade programme covering avionics, radar, electronic warfare and flight-control systems for the existing in-service fleet.

Species-specific conservation projects follow the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 Schedule framework: Schedule I confers the highest protection (tiger, lion, elephant, several vultures), while lower schedules carry lesser restrictions. Project Lion sits alongside Project Tiger (1973) and Project Cheetah (2022) as flagship single-species conservation vehicles, each with dedicated funding and monitoring infrastructure; Project Lion additionally funds 33 rapid-response units and roughly 11,000 machans to manage human-lion conflict outside Gir’s boundary.
The Asiatic lion survives only in Gujarat’s Gir landscape, the world’s sole wild population of the subspecies, a single-site concentration that remains a core conservation-biology concern independent of the encouraging population trend.

India’s major physiographic and forest regions each host distinct flagship species: the Western Ghats’ evergreen forests (Nilgiri tahr, lion-tailed macaque), the Aravallis’ thorn-scrub (limited large-carnivore habitat), the Deccan’s black-cotton grasslands (Great Indian Bustard), and the Kathiawar peninsula’s dry deciduous forest, the Asiatic lion’s sole wild refuge. Single-site population concentration is a recognised conservation-biology vulnerability, distinct from numerical decline, because it removes redundancy: one epidemic, wildfire, or extreme weather event can eliminate a disproportionate share of a species in one stroke.
The unresolved Kuno reintroduction, ordered by the Supreme Court on April 15, 2013 in Centre for Environmental Law, WWF-I v. Union of India, illustrates how a scientifically settled conservation-biology risk can remain unaddressed for institutional and political reasons even after judicial intervention.

Article 368’s “federal provisions” (for example, changes affecting representation of states in Parliament, or the amendment procedure itself) require ratification by at least half the state legislatures alongside a two-thirds special majority in Parliament. Article 3 renaming Bills are deliberately kept outside this heavier procedure: Parliament need only pass them by simple majority after presidential recommendation and, where relevant, reference to the state legislature for its views, which are advisory, not binding.
This is the mechanism that let Madras become Tamil Nadu (1969), Mysore become Karnataka (1973), Uttaranchal become Uttarakhand (2007), and Orissa become Odisha (2011). West Bengal’s “Bangla” proposal (a 2018 Assembly resolution) illustrates the reverse: because the Union government never recommended the Bill for introduction, the state’s own resolution could not force the process forward, showing the Union’s structurally dominant hand in this quasi-federal mechanism.

Tribunals were created under Articles 323A and 323B, inserted by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment, 1976, to provide specialised, faster adjudication outside the ordinary court hierarchy for service matters, tax, company law, environmental and other disputes. A sustained line of Supreme Court litigation led by the Madras Bar Association, R. Gandhi v. Union of India (2010) and subsequent rulings in 2014, 2015, 2020 and 2021, repeatedly struck down executive-heavy appointment structures for undermining judicial independence and the separation of powers, including striking down aspects of the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021.
The 2026 Bill’s National Tribunals Commission, headquartered in New Delhi and covering 16 tribunals including the CAT, NGT, NCLAT, ITAT and SAT, is the government’s latest attempt to build a permanent, standing oversight structure, rather than case-by-case committees, that can withstand this scrutiny while also maintaining a National Tribunals Data Grid on case pendency.

India’s post-liberalisation economic-regulation architecture replaced several pre-1991 control-era statutes with market-oriented successors: the MRTP Act, 1969 (anti-monopoly, pre-liberalisation) gave way to the Competition Act, 2002 (regulating cartels, abuse of dominance, and combination or merger review), while FERA, 1973 was separately replaced by FEMA, 1999. The Competition Commission of India, chaired by Ravneet Kaur and comprising up to six other members, all requiring judicial standing or 15-plus years’ specialised professional experience, is appointed by the Central Government via a Selection Committee chaired by the Chief Justice of India or a nominee.
India’s 2026 BRICS Chairship, its fourth time chairing the grouping, under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”, places the Commission at the centre of plurilateral competition-policy coordination among BRICS members for the year.

El Nino and La Nina are opposite phases of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a coupled ocean-atmosphere pattern centred on the tropical Pacific. During El Nino, warmer sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific shift convective rainfall away from the Indonesian maritime continent and the western Pacific, producing drought-like dry-season conditions across Indonesia, Malaysia and parts of Australia, while La Nina does the reverse, bringing wetter conditions to the same region.
This has historically translated into severe Indonesian forest and peatland fire seasons in strong El Nino years, notably 1997-98 and 2015. The Indian Ocean Dipole is a related but separate driver: its positive phase (warmer western Indian Ocean) tends to suppress rainfall over Indonesia, while its negative phase enhances it, the opposite of the effect wrongly attributed to it in one of this question’s options.

Late-19th and early-20th century Tamil literary and philosophical figures are frequently conflated in general recall, but each is associated with a distinct strand: Manonmaniam Sundaram Pillai combined Neo-Vedantic philosophy with Tamil dramatic verse; Subramania Bharati is remembered for nationalist and social-reform poetry in the run-up to Independence; U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, popularly Tamil Thatha, is celebrated for recovering and publishing lost Sangam-era palm-leaf manuscripts, effectively founding modern Tamil textual scholarship; and Bharathidasan is associated with Dravidian-movement-era rationalist poetry from the mid-20th century. Tamil Thaai Vazhthu’s formal notification as the state song in 2021 and its August 2026 mandate at official functions sit within this broader tradition of language-identity assertion in Tamil Nadu’s political culture.

India’s forest-type classification, following Champion and Seth, distinguishes tropical moist and dry deciduous forests, sal’s primary habitat, from tropical evergreen and semi-evergreen forests (Western Ghats, Northeast hills), thorn forests (arid Rajasthan and Gujarat), montane temperate and alpine forests (higher Himalayas), and mangrove forests (deltaic coasts like the Sundarbans). Sal forests are economically and ecologically significant, historically prized for timber, and support associated flora and fauna including, as this new species shows, specific fungal symbionts.
Species descriptions like Russula griseopurpurata (family Russulaceae, subgenus Heterophyllidiae) rely on both traditional morphological study and DNA-based molecular phylogenetics to confirm novelty, a two-pronged verification standard now expected in taxonomic publication.