Current Affairs Quiz 13 August 2026

The flexible inflation-targeting (FIT) framework was formally adopted via a 2016 amendment to the RBI Act, 1934, establishing the six-member Monetary Policy Committee with a mandate to target 4% CPI inflation within a 2%-6% band, reviewed every five years by the central government in consultation with the RBI. If inflation breaches the band for three consecutive quarters, the RBI must submit a report to the government explaining the failure, the reasons, and the remedial timeline, a formal accountability mechanism that has been invoked rarely since 2016. July 2026’s CPI reading of 4.45%, driven by a Consumer Food Price Index of 5.52% and a wider rural-urban gap (rural 4.84% vs urban 3.96%), remains within the tolerance band and does not trigger this mechanism, but marks a second consecutive above-target month after a period of relatively benign inflation.

The India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) was approved by the Union Cabinet in December 2021 with a financial outlay of approximately Rs 76,000 crore, functioning as the nodal, specialised business division within the Digital India Corporation, operating under MeitY, to design and implement schemes for developing India’s semiconductor and display manufacturing ecosystem, including fabrication plants, ATMP (assembly, testing, marking, packaging) units, and chip design incentives. States have increasingly built their own semiconductor-specific investment promotion policies (Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh among them) to compete for these capital-intensive, high-technology investments, given semiconductors’ strategic importance for electronics manufacturing, defence and telecom self-reliance.

India’s three national culture academies were established to provide institutional patronage for distinct artistic domains: the Sangeet Natak Akademi (1952) for music, dance and drama; the Sahitya Akademi (1954) for literature across India’s scheduled and other languages; and the Lalit Kala Akademi (1954) for visual arts including painting, sculpture and graphics. All three function as autonomous bodies under the Ministry of Culture, each conferring annual fellowships and awards recognising excellence and lifetime contribution in their domain.
The Sangeet Natak Akademi additionally serves as India’s nodal agency for nominations to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a role tested in prior UPSC cycles alongside India’s specific ICH inscriptions.

A cess is a tax on tax, or an additional levy earmarked for a specific declared purpose, distinct from general taxation which typically enters a shared or general revenue pool. At the Union level, cesses (such as the Health and Education Cess or the erstwhile GST Compensation Cess) are explicitly excluded from the Article 270 divisible pool that the Finance Commission uses to determine states’ shares of central tax revenue, a design that has drawn criticism for shrinking the effective divisible pool over time even as the Union’s overall tax collection has grown.
States possess independent power to levy their own cesses within their own taxation domain (here, VAT on petroleum products, since petroleum remains outside GST), and Himachal Pradesh’s 60-paise cess, enabled by its 2026 VAT Amendment Bill with a ceiling of Rs 5/litre, is one such state-level instance, earmarked for widow and orphan welfare rather than general revenue.

Kavach is an indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system, developed by Indian Railways in partnership with the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO) and domestic industry partners, and was previously known as TCAS (Train Collision Avoidance System) before rebranding. It works by continuously monitoring train speed and signal aspects via trackside RFID tags and onboard systems, automatically triggering brakes if a locomotive pilot fails to respond to a mandated speed reduction or stop signal, directly targeting human-error-caused collisions, a recurring cause of major rail accidents.
Its nationwide rollout has been prioritised on high-density and high-speed routes following major accidents, with successive versions (Kavach 3.2, 4.0) improving interoperability and communication reliability; Version 4.0’s LTE-based backbone is its principal technical upgrade in the current rollout phase.

India’s fertiliser subsidy architecture operates through the Nutrient-Based Subsidy (NBS) framework introduced in 2010, under which subsidy rates are fixed annually per nutrient (N, P, K, S) rather than per fertiliser product, intended to encourage balanced nutrient use. However, urea remains a partial exception: its Maximum Retail Price is statutorily fixed by the government (not fully NBS-decontrolled like DAP and complex fertilisers), with the government bearing the difference between import/production cost and the capped retail price as subsidy.
This structure means disruptions to import cost or supply chains, such as the 2026 West Asia-driven urea sourcing shift toward Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria and Georgia, translate relatively directly into fiscal subsidy pressure, reinforcing the policy case for domestic self-sufficiency levers like Nano Urea and reviving closed PSU fertiliser plants.

India’s Open Government Data (OGD) movement traces to the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), notified in 2012, which mandates proactive disclosure of non-sensitive government datasets through platforms like the Union-level data.gov.in portal, administered by the National Informatics Centre under MeitY. The stated objectives are transparency, accountability, and enabling data-driven research, innovation and policymaking by making raw government datasets (spanning agriculture, health, transport, economy) freely available in machine-readable formats. State-level extensions like Karnataka’s Tathyakosh, built by the state’s Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, represent a growing trend of sub-national governments building their own OGD infrastructure tailored to state-specific datasets, complementing rather than duplicating the Union-level platform.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) was established under the NIA Act, 2008, enacted in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, to serve as India’s central counter-terrorism law enforcement agency with suo motu jurisdiction across states for offences listed in the Act’s Schedule. The 2019 amendment to the NIA Act significantly expanded this schedule beyond core terrorism offences to include human trafficking, offences related to prohibited weapons, cyber-terrorism, and offences under the Explosive Substances Act, and empowered the agency to investigate offences committed outside India against Indian citizens or affecting Indian interests.
Large-scale, cross-border narcotics trafficking, particularly where it intersects with terror financing or organised transnational criminal networks (as with the Golden Triangle-linked Andaman Sea seizure), is treated as falling within this expanded, national-security-linked mandate rather than ordinary NDPS Act policing alone.

Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala (1986) arose when three Jehovah’s Witness children were expelled from school in Kerala for standing respectfully but not singing the National Anthem during the morning assembly, citing their religious beliefs against venerating anything other than their faith’s deity. The Supreme Court held this expulsion unconstitutional, ruling that Article 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech, which includes the right to silence) and Article 25 (freedom of conscience) protected their conduct, since there was no law requiring anyone to actually sing the anthem, only laws penalising active disrespect or disruption.
This precedent remains the operative interpretive framework for India’s national-symbol protection statutes, including the original Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 and its 2026 amendment extending equivalent protection to Vande Mataram, both of which criminalise active disruption or prevention, not passive non-participation.

NAVYA, launched in 2025, targets girls aged 16-18 in underserved, tribal and aspirational districts, aiming to steer participants toward non-traditional and emerging-sector skills (digital marketing, cybersecurity) rather than the conventional trades (tailoring, cosmetology, secretarial work) where women’s ITI enrolment has historically concentrated. Alongside vocational training, it includes a mandatory life-skills module covering hygiene, POSH/POCSO awareness and financial literacy.
The programme’s pilot phase targets 3,850 girls across 27 districts in 19 states, scaled up from an initial 2025 cohort of roughly nine districts across nine states. The programme directly responds to data showing women comprise a much smaller share of enrolment in core engineering ITI trades (electrician, welder, fitter) than in the sector overall, a gap examined in depth in Ujiyari’s coverage of Skill Development Minister Jayant Chaudhary’s August 12 op-ed.

India’s National Organ Donation Day, observed August 3, commemorates the country’s first successful deceased-donor heart transplant in 1994, and is used by the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), functioning under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, to raise awareness of organ donation and address India’s persistently low deceased-donor donation rates relative to countries like Spain or the United States. World Organ Donation Day, observed globally on August 13, is a separate, internationally recognised observance with its own distinct origin, not tied to any specific Indian medical milestone.
NOTTO itself was established in 2014 as India’s apex body coordinating organ procurement and distribution, operating the National Organ and Tissue Transplant programme and maintaining the National Registry.