Current Affairs Quiz 27 August 2026

UNCERD published its concluding observations on India on 25 August 2026, document symbol CERD/C/IND/CO/20-21, covering India’s combined twentieth and twenty-first periodic reports. This was India’s 11th periodic review under ICERD, held in Geneva on 11 and 12 August 2026 during the Committee’s 118th session (10 to 25 August 2026), with a delegation headed by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta.
On 26 August the Ministry of External Affairs rejected the observations, with Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal stating that India rejects any politically motivated highly malicious references in the report with all the contempt that it deserves. Note that this is a single continuous phrase qualifying the references in the report, not two separate descriptors.
The same session also adopted a General Recommendation on reparatory justice for colonialism, enslavement and the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. ICERD was adopted in 1965 and entered into force in 1969; India signed in 1967 and ratified in 1968.
The Committee comprises 18 independent experts and is the oldest UN human rights treaty body. India has NOT made the declaration under Article 14 of ICERD, so the Committee has no individual-complaints jurisdiction over India.
India’s long-standing legal position, maintained including at the 2001 Durban Conference, is that caste-based discrimination does not fall within the definition of racial discrimination in Article 1.

A flash flood, reported as avalanche-triggered, tore down the Bhote Koshi gorge on Nepal’s border with Tibet on 26 August 2026, destroying the Rasuwagadhi border post, bridges, hydropower plants and the only overland road linking Kathmandu to Tibet. Figures moved fast and diverged: Nepal Police confirmed at least 157 killed as of 27 August, with higher counts of around 353 carried in later reporting the same day.
The Ministry of External Affairs said on 27 August that 288 Indian nationals were uncontactable, released state-wise details, opened a control room, and reported 21 Indians rescued, all from Tamil Nadu. Treat every such figure as provisional.
Critically, “out of contact” is not a casualty count, since communications and roads were destroyed. Two different Nepali rivers are called the Bhote Koshi, and confusing them is the standard error here.
The river that flooded is the Bhote Koshi of Rasuwa district, which is the upper reach of the Trishuli, formed where the Kyirong (Gyirong) Tsangpo and the Lhende Khola meet near Rasuwagadhi. It flows into the Narayani (Gandaki) and enters India as the Gandak, so despite its name it is NOT in the Koshi basin.
A different river, the Poiqu or Matsang Tsangpo at the Kodari-Tatopani crossing in Sindhupalchok district, is the one that feeds the Sun Koshi and thence the Koshi, the Sorrow of Bihar. ICIMOD did not classify this event as a GLOF, attributing it instead to a suspected ice-rock avalanche into the Lhende Khola, and the USGS attributed it to a glacial collapse.
Rasuwagadhi to Kerung is one of two main Nepal-China crossings, the other being Tatopani to Zhangmu. ICIMOD, the regional Hindu Kush Himalaya body, is headquartered in Kathmandu.
Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar lie in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Lipulekh pass is Indian territory in Pithoragarh district, Uttarakhand.

The Union government filed a modification application in the Supreme Court on 24 August 2026 against a judgment of 11 March 2026 by Justices P. S. Narasimha and R. Mahadevan, which held that children of PSU and private sector employees cannot be denied OBC reservation solely on parental salary and that the status and category of the parent’s post must be considered. The Centre seeks two years to frame a uniform equivalence policy, prospective application only, and carve-outs where rights are settled.
It cites ramifications for nearly 100 OBC candidates selected through the Civil Services Examination since 2016. The creamy layer was operationalised by the DoPT Office Memorandum of 8 September 1993 based on the Justice R. N. Prasad Committee criteria.
The current income ceiling is Rs 8 lakh per annum, EXCLUDING salary and agricultural income, which is precisely the source of the present anomaly.

At UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav urged science-based, community-led rangeland restoration recognising pastoralists as custodians rather than beneficiaries, and a USD 1.3 billion package for restoring the world’s rangelands was launched. UNCCD is one of the three Rio Conventions with the UNFCCC and the CBD, adopted in 1994, in force from 1996, with its secretariat at Bonn.
It is the only legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management. India hosted COP14 at New Delhi in 2019, where it raised its land restoration pledge to 26 million hectares by 2030.
India cited its roughly 10 million hectares of permanent pastures, the cheetah reintroduction, and Banni in Kachchh, Gujarat, which is Asia’s largest tropical grassland where Maldhari pastoralists hold community forest rights. 2026 is the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Dr Mohan Yadav performed the shila-pujan of 45 sacred stones and laid the foundation of a Panchayatan-style temple at Ekatma Dham, Omkareshwar, Khandwa district, on 27 August 2026. The temple is in Nagara style, with a 26-foot-diameter dome over the main mandapa, 100 carved pillars, 121 kalashas and about 80,000 cubic feet of pink sandstone from Bansi Paharpur, Rajasthan, on a 16-foot jagati platform.
The traceable cabinet-approved outlay of Rs 2,195 crore relates to the Ekatma Dham and Advaita Lok Sangrahalaya project as a whole, not to the temple alone. Ekatma Dham already hosts the 108-foot Statue of Oneness of Adi Shankaracharya as a twelve-year-old, unveiled on 21 September 2023.
Tradition holds that Shankaracharya received initiation from Govindapada at Omkareshwar, which is one of the twelve Jyotirlingas, on Mandhata island in the Narmada. His four mathas are at Sringeri, Dwarka, Puri and Jyotirmath.

India announced on 27 August 2026 that the 18th BRICS Summit will be held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi on 12 and 13 September 2026. The summit is scheduled and has not yet taken place.
India assumed its fourth BRICS chairship on 1 January 2026 under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”, with a people-centric “Humanity First” framing, and 2026 marks twenty years since BRICS was established. The sequence matters: the term BRIC was coined in 2001 as an investment thesis, the first BRIC foreign ministers’ meeting was held in 2006 on the UN General Assembly sidelines, the first standalone summit was at Yekaterinburg in 2009, and South Africa joined in 2010.
India previously hosted in 2012 at New Delhi, 2016 at Goa and 2021 virtually.

A NITI Aayog report on Ease of Doing Research and Development in India maps obstacles across funding, human resources, institutional processes, translational capacity, access to resources, regional disparities and governance, and recommends raising Gross Expenditure on Research and Development from about 0.6 per cent to 2 per cent of GDP within five years. India’s GERD stands at roughly 0.64 to 0.7 per cent, against above 4 per cent for Israel and South Korea and above 2 per cent for the United States and China.
In most advanced economies business enterprise funds the majority of R&D, whereas in India the government share is larger. Related instruments include the RDI scheme with a Rs 1 lakh crore corpus for private-sector-led research, NEP 2020’s recommendation of a National Research Foundation, and Vigyan Dhara, the consolidated DST scheme.
NITI Aayog itself was constituted by Cabinet resolution on 1 January 2015 and is neither constitutional nor statutory.

Government data as of 25 August 2026 showed 45 coal-fired power plants at critically low stocks, up from 31 at end-July, of which 40 are domestic-coal-fired. Aggregate stock stood at 30.95 million tonnes, about 10 days of requirement, down from 12 days in July, a drawdown of about 19 per cent.
The cause was heavy rainfall in Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh disrupting both mining and rail evacuation, alongside elevated demand. Coal accounts for roughly three-quarters of India’s electricity generation.
Coal India Limited is a Maharatna CPSE under the Ministry of Coal and the world’s largest coal producer. Policy instruments include SHAKTI, the Scheme for Harnessing and Allocating Koyala Transparently in India, commercial coal mining opened to auction in 2020, the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, and Section 11 of the Electricity Act, 2003, which empowers the Government to direct generating companies in extraordinary circumstances.

India has the largest network of Ramsar sites in Asia. The domestic framework includes the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017, the National Plan for Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems, and the Amrit Sarovar Mission for village water bodies.
The recurring failure mode in Indian urban lake management is that interventions treat the symptom, meaning algal bloom, froth and visible encroachment, while leaving untreated sewage inflow and catchment encroachment untouched. Eutrophication is the underlying process: nutrient enrichment, principally from sewage, drives algal growth whose decomposition depletes dissolved oxygen.
Bellandur in Bengaluru, Hussain Sagar in Hyderabad and Dal in Srinagar are the standard case studies. Note that a lake and a notified wetland are not the same legal category; the Wetlands Rules apply to notified wetlands and exclude certain categories, so many urban lakes have weaker protection than assumed.

At an annual review meeting on 25 August 2026 chaired by the Secretary, Department of Financial Services, consolidated RRB net profit was reported at an all-time high of Rs 10,176 crore in FY 2025-26, up from Rs 6,820 crore in FY 2024-25, with total business crossing Rs 13.5 lakh crore. Gross NPA fell to 5.3 per cent and net NPA to 2.1 per cent, both all-time lows, and RRBs added about 54.98 lakh new PMJDY accounts.
RRBs were established under the Regional Rural Banks Act, 1976, following the Narasimham Working Group of 1975. The first RRB, Prathama Bank, opened on 2 October 1975, which is before the Act, a detail that catches candidates out.
RRBs are regulated by the RBI and supervised by NABARD. The One State, One RRB consolidation reduced their number to 28, effective 1 May 2025.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay announced in the Assembly on 24 August 2026 the cancellation of the Parandur greenfield airport, selected in 2022 at an estimated Rs 27,000 crore over roughly 5,369 acres, citing public opposition and protection of agricultural land. Note the standing correction: Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister is C. Joseph Vijay of TVK, sworn in on 10 May 2026 after TVK won 108 of 234 seats; any reference to M. K. Stalin as incumbent is out of date.
The CM also announced Annapoorani Super 6, giving three free LPG cylinders a year to women heads of households earning under Rs 2.5 lakh from Pongal 2027, covering about 1.30 crore families at about Rs 4,000 crore a year, and an expansion of Vetri Payanam free bus travel from 2 October 2026 with no income ceiling and no trip limit at about Rs 6,000 crore a year. Greenfield airports additionally require site clearance under the Greenfield Airports Policy, 2008.

The Hindu’s editorial page of 27 August 2026 welcomed the confidence-building content of the eight-point consensus reached at the 25th Special Representatives meeting in Beijing on 25 August 2026, including expert-level meetings on trans-border rivers with hydrological data sharing, two additional military commander meeting points, and hotlines for the Eastern and Middle Sectors, while objecting that both sides committed to an early and substantial harvest of boundary delimitation without stating which sectors are in play or what framework applies. The SR mechanism was created in 2003 with Brajesh Mishra and Dai Bingguo as the first Special Representatives, and operates under the 2005 Agreement on Political Parameters and Guiding Principles, whose three-stage process has completed only the first stage.
Article VII of that Agreement safeguards settled populations in border areas. The Brahmaputra is called the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet.

The Hindu’s opinion lead of 27 August 2026, by Elisabeth Faure of the World Food Programme India and Purvi Mehta, argued that India’s Green Revolution-era food security architecture was built for production adequacy and now needs retrofitting for climate resilience, through wider MSP procurement of water-efficient millets and pulses, integration of IMD forecasts into buffer-stock policy, and treating climate risk as a foundational design principle. The National Food Security Act, 2013 covers up to 75 per cent of the rural and 50 per cent of the urban population.
The Food Corporation of India was established in 1965 under the Food Corporations Act, 1964. 2023 was the International Year of Millets, proposed by India, and millets are designated Shree Anna. The core critique is that assured procurement concentrated on rice and wheat locks in water-intensive cropping precisely where groundwater is most depleted.

Business Standard’s editorial of 27 August 2026 argued that with retail sugar rising about 16 per cent in a month, from about Rs 48.18 per kg on 20 July to Rs 55.70 on 20 August, and output falling to roughly 30.6 million tonnes against an initial estimate of about 34.3 million tonnes, the Centre’s duty-free import window for one million tonnes of raw sugar until 31 October, backed by stock limits, is the right corrective. It cautioned that falling ex-mill prices may mean only about half the permitted quantity is imported, and argued that blaming ethanol diversion alone is misplaced given its declining share of sugar use and the faster payment it delivers to mills and thence to farmers.
The shortfall had identified agronomic causes: excess rain and waterlogging in Maharashtra and Karnataka, and red rot, caused by Colletotrichum falcatum, together with top-borer in Uttar Pradesh. A separate Minimum Selling Price sets an ex-mill floor for sugar.

Down To Earth’s piece of 27 August 2026 by Jay Singh Rawat argued that the Nepal, Rishiganga and Dharali disasters share a mechanism conventional flood science does not anticipate: catastrophic floods triggered by collapsing rock-ice masses rather than by rainfall alone. The sequence runs from permafrost thaw weakening the ice that binds rock masses, to detachment of a rock-ice mass into a steep confined valley, to either a direct flood wave or a temporary landslide dam whose breach releases a larger one.
None of these steps requires rainfall, which is why a warning system keyed to precipitation thresholds never activates. This is a detection failure rather than a forecasting failure.
ICIMOD, headquartered in Kathmandu, is the regional Hindu Kush Himalaya body; NDMA operates under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 and is chaired by the Prime Minister; the Central Water Commission handles flood forecasting while the IMD handles rainfall.