Current Affairs Quiz 24 August 2026

The 2026 edition was the third, with the national event hosted by ISRO’s Space Applications Centre at Ahmedabad on 23 August 2026, on the theme “Towards Viksit Bharat: Innovating, Collaborating and Aspiring to Global Space Leadership”. The landing site is designated Shiv Shakti Point.

Chief Guest was Union Minister for Culture and Tourism Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, with Dr V. Narayanan, Secretary of the Department of Space and Chairman of ISRO, presiding, and IN-SPACe Chairman Dr Pawan Kumar Goenka participating. The Chairman said more than 440 space start-ups have emerged since the 2020 reforms, and set out a plan of eight launch vehicle missions and 12 satellites in the current financial year, with the first uncrewed Gaganyaan test flight in about four months.

Those figures are his spoken remarks reported from the event, not a published target document.

IN-SPACe is chaired by Dr Pawan Kumar Goenka. ISRO is chaired by Dr V. Narayanan, who is also Secretary of the Department of Space, so the same individual holds both the departmental and agency roles.

More than 440 space start-ups have emerged since the 2020 reforms, though a start-up count is an input measure rather than an output one, and the number that have actually reached orbit is much smaller. Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 achieved orbital success earlier in 2026 and the team was felicitated at the National Space Day event.

The Supreme Court applied this framework on 22 August 2026 in Vyakti Vikas Kendra India v. Manoj Misra (Dead) and Others, 2026 INSC 910, decided by Justices Satish Chandra Sharma and N. Kotiswar Singh. The Court set aside the National Green Tribunal’s 2017 order that had imposed Rs 5 crore on the Art of Living Foundation for damage to the Yamuna floodplains from the 2016 World Culture Festival, and directed the Delhi Development Authority to refund the amount within four weeks.

It held that the principle “cannot be invoked unless the degradation is attributable to the alleged person”, and found the site was already dilapidated before it was handed over.

The NGT was created by the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 and has jurisdiction over seven scheduled environmental statutes. In the August 2026 Yamuna floodplain ruling, the Supreme Court criticised the Tribunal for reaching its conclusion without examining contemporaneous evidence of the pre-existing state of the floodplain, relying instead on an expert report the Court described as sweeping and based on the members’ subjective assessment.

That institutional criticism, about the standard of fact-finding expected of a specialised body, is arguably the stronger half of the judgment.

On 24 August 2026 the Government announced that the RBI special USD-INR swap facility, launched on 8 June 2026 and covering FCNR(B) deposits, Overseas Foreign Currency Borrowings and External Commercial Borrowings, had mobilised USD 73 billion as on 21 August 2026, of which FCNR(B) deposits alone were USD 65.40 billion. The FCNR(B) window closure was advanced from 30 September to 31 August 2026.

For comparison, the 2013 FCNR(B) swap during the taper tantrum raised about USD 26 billion over roughly three months. Note that the USD 73 billion is an interim figure with days still to run, not a final total.

MNRE announced on 24 August 2026, at the first regional roadshow for the Bharat Renewable Energy Summit at Jaipur, that non-fossil capacity had reached 300.50 GW as of 31 July 2026, securing over 60 per cent of the 500 GW target. Note the dates carefully: the milestone is dated 31 July and only the announcement falls on 24 August.

The BRE Summit runs 2 to 5 November 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, alongside the 9th ISA Assembly and the 4th International Conference on Green Hydrogen. The International Solar Alliance is headquartered at Gurugram and was jointly launched by India and France at COP21.

The official release announcing 300.50 GW stated that this “accounts for over 54 per cent of India’s total electricity generation”. That sentence conflates installed capacity share with generation share and should not be reproduced.

Coal still supplies roughly three-quarters of India’s electricity generation. The binding constraints on the transition have moved downstream to transmission and evacuation capacity, round-the-clock firming, storage economics and the financial health of distribution companies.

Rajasthan’s shift toward wind-solar hybrids, battery storage and green hydrogen, described at the same roadshow, is a response to exactly those constraints.

ABS was operationalised internationally by the Nagoya Protocol, adopted in 2010 and in force from 2014, to which India is a party. On 22 August 2026 the National Biodiversity Authority disbursed Rs 2.82 crore in ABS funds, of which Rs 2.80 crore went to 27 State Biodiversity Boards and 3 Union Territory Biodiversity Councils and Rs 2.01 lakh to ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru.

The funds came from Advanta Enterprises Ltd, formerly UPL Limited, for genetic resources associated with eight hybrids of cauliflower and five of hot pepper. Because the resources were accessed through a corporate acquisition, the original benefit claimers could not be traced, and an Expert Committee modality was used to distribute the money instead.

The NBA is a statutory autonomous body established in 2003, headquartered at Chennai, under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The Act was amended by the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023, which eased compliance for Indian companies and registered AYUSH practitioners.

Biodiversity Management Committees maintain People’s Biodiversity Registers, which are the local evidentiary base for benefit claims, and which matter precisely in cases like the August 2026 disbursal where provenance was otherwise lost through a corporate acquisition.

MAC originated in the recommendations following the Kargil Review Committee and the associated Group of Ministers process, and was substantially strengthened after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. At the 9th National Security Strategies Conference on 24 August 2026, Union Home Minister Amit Shah directed that AI-based analysis of information on MAC platforms be used to create standard operating procedures.

The conference was held in hybrid format with over 850 participants and has run annually in that format since 2021. Day-two themes included sub-aerial systems, blue economy security, information warfare and a bio-security framework.

At the 9th National Security Strategies Conference on 24 August 2026, the Home Minister directed that trials be expedited by bringing back fugitives and by using trial in absentia provisions, alongside an integrated approach to UAPA investigations. The UAPA dates from 1967 and was amended in 2019 to permit the designation of individuals, not only organisations, as terrorists.

Trial in absentia is an efficiency gain against absconders who have placed themselves beyond process, but it sits in tension with fair-trial guarantees under Article 21, and the safeguards that matter are adequate notice, mandatory legal representation and a right to seek retrial on return.

The Declaration welcomes the Action Plan and Terms of Reference of the Task Force under the Working Group on Research Infrastructures and Mega-science Projects, records progress toward operationalising the BRICS Global Research Advanced Infrastructure Network (BRICS GRAIN), welcomes a BRICS Science and Research Repository as a digital public good, and endorses the STI Calendar for 2026-27. Note that GRAIN is recorded as progress toward operationalising, meaning it is not yet operational.

India’s BRICS chairship theme for 2026 is “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”, and the STI Ministerial process passes to China’s chairship in 2027.

The meeting adopted the BRICS Sports Joint Declaration by consensus. Union Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports Dr Mansukh Mandaviya advanced three initiatives: a BRICS Working Group on Sports Technology, a BRICS Sports Manufacturing Conclave proposed for Udaipur in November 2026, and BRICS Traditional and Indigenous Sports Demonstration Games proposed for Ahmedabad on 12 and 13 October 2026 in a non-competitive format.

He also referred to a forthcoming scheme for Sports Goods Manufacturing Clusters. Record the Conclave, the Games and the clusters scheme as proposals or forthcoming, not as fixtures held or schemes launched.

The Third India-Cambodia Joint Working Group on Trade and Investment met at Phnom Penh on 24 August 2026. Trade grew over 36 per cent from USD 299 million, with 63.25 per cent year-on-year growth in the April to June 2026 quarter.

The meeting welcomed the launch of UPI acceptance at KHQR-enabled merchants in Phnom Penh on 2 June 2026; KHQR is Cambodia’s national QR standard run by the National Bank of Cambodia through the Bakong system. The reverse leg, allowing Cambodian apps to scan UPI QR codes in India, is under discussion and not yet live.

An MoU on Customs Cooperation and a Bilateral Investment Treaty were discussed but neither has been signed.

The mission launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, Hainan, aboard a Long March-5 (Y14), targeting a landing near Shackleton crater. It is an explicit precursor to China’s planned crewed lunar landing, targeted for 2030, and carries international payloads including a Russian dust-detection instrument, an Italian laser retroreflector, a Bahrain and Egypt developed camera, a Thai-Chinese high-energy particle instrument and a Swiss dual-channel Earth radiation spectrometer.

The launch fell the day after India observed National Space Day, which marks the Chandrayaan-3 landing in the same polar region.