Current Affairs Quiz 28 August 2026

The full list under Article 240 is the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, and Ladakh, plus Puducherry when its legislature is suspended or dissolved. The power is remarkable in substance: such a regulation has the same force and effect as an Act of Parliament and may repeal or amend an Act of Parliament in its application to that territory.
It is plenary lawmaking vested in the executive, available precisely where no legislature exists to exercise it.

The Regulation permits Judges and Division Courts to sit at a place in Ladakh appointed by the Chief Justice with the approval of the Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh. Three limitations are built in: the principal seat is expressly preserved, so this is a bench and not a second High Court; the Chief Justice retains discretion to direct that a Ladakh case be heard at Srinagar or Jammu; and commencement is by notification of the Administrator of Ladakh, so the bench is not yet sitting.
Between Leh and Kargil, the choice of place will itself be contested.

Both are recognised in Section 89 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, inserted in 1999 and effective from 2002, which empowers a court to refer a dispute to arbitration, conciliation, judicial settlement including Lok Adalat, or mediation. Conciliation is dealt with in the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996.
Mediation now has its own statute, the Mediation Act, 2023. A further distinction worth holding: a Lok Adalat award under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, is deemed a decree of a civil court and is final with no appeal.

The Mediation Council of India, the regulator that registers mediators and recognises Mediation Service Providers, was notified only on 27 August 2026 under Section 31(1), roughly three years after the Act received assent in September 2023. That gap is a clean implementation-deficit case study: the Act existed, its machinery did not.
Note the safeguard: unlike a Lok Adalat award, which is final and non-appealable, a mediated settlement agreement may be challenged on limited grounds such as fraud, corruption or impersonation.

Three separate OGEL SOPs, covering major platforms and equipment, parts and components, and intra-company technology transfer, were consolidated into a single unified SOP. Stakeholder consultation was dispensed with for non-lethal items to most destinations and for all items going to international tenders and exhibitions. A new provision allows OGEL for Indian firms holding long-term contracts with Foreign OEMs, with validity co-terminus with the contract.
Note what has moved rather than disappeared: pre-shipment approval is a preventive control, post-shipment end-use monitoring is a detective one, and India has not tested the second at this scale.

India’s NSG membership has been blocked principally over the question of admitting states that are not parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India is not an NPT signatory.
Separately, India’s own dual-use export control list is SCOMET, Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment and Technologies, administered by the DGFT under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, with munitions in Category 6 licensed by the Department of Defence Production.

PMJDY completed twelve years on 28 August 2026. Data as on 19 August 2026 show 59.09 crore accounts holding Rs 3,16,514 crore, with average deposit per account at Rs 5,356.
Deposits are up about 12.8 times against accounts up about 2.3 times, which is the ratio that answers the old zero-balance criticism. Women hold 55.7 per cent of accounts and 77.8 per cent are rural and semi-urban.
Note the reporting convention: state the data-as-on date, since the snapshot predates the anniversary.

Total subscribers stood at 1,354.28 million at end-July 2026, but active wireless subscribers on the date of peak VLR were 1,204.01 million, a gap of roughly 150 million. Where welfare delivery, DBT, health records and education assume a working phone, that gap and the rural figure are where exclusion errors live.
Read it directly against Jan Dhan: an account plus Aadhaar plus a mobile is the operating assumption of the JAM architecture, and rural teledensity is its weakest leg. VLR, the Visitor Location Register, is what makes the active count possible.

July 2026 IIP grew 6.7 per cent, easing from 7.3 per cent in June. The composition is the story: electricity and gas supply grew 8.7 per cent and manufacturing 7.3 per cent, while mining and quarrying contracted 0.9 per cent.
Growth carried by utilities and consumer-facing manufacturing while upstream extraction contracts can mean the expansion is running on existing capacity utilisation rather than new investment. Note also that RBI corporate sales growth of 19.4 per cent for Q1 FY27 is nominal and value-based over a quarter, and is not comparable with a real, volume-based monthly IIP figure.

On 27 August 2026 the CAG, K. Sanjay Murthy, launched the Certification on Audit of Digital Systems with IIT Madras, and said it would in time become mandatory for officers auditing digital systems. The significance is what it concedes about the audit object.
When an entitlement is granted or refused by a system rather than an officer, the decision exists in code, configuration and thresholds rather than in a file, and a wrong rule applies to every transaction it touches rather than to one case. An auditor who cannot audit an algorithm cannot discharge the Article 148 mandate over DBT and Aadhaar-linked delivery.

The snow leopard is on Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, on CITES Appendix I and on CMS Appendix I. Its Indian range covers Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, and it occurs across twelve range countries. On 26 August 2026 India presented advances in population estimation, radio telemetry and genetic analysis at a Russia-India roundtable in Moscow, under a partnership between the Interregional Association Irbis and the International Big Cat Alliance signed in December 2025.
Unlike other Panthera species, the snow leopard cannot roar.

The overlap is the analytically interesting part. GSLEP already occupies the ground, with a secretariat and an agreed framework across all twelve range countries.
A second alliance adds value only if it supplies something GSLEP does not, most plausibly finance and technical standards. If it supplies only meetings and declarations, it fragments an already thin institutional field, and range states with limited capacity end up reporting to two bodies instead of one.
The Russia partnership is the easiest possible bilateral test case; the hard test is China, which holds the majority of the global range.

The school-entry demand came later and produced the longer struggle. In 1904, denied government schooling, he built a school for Dalit children himself; it was destroyed by upper-caste men.
He founded the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham in 1907 and petitioned the government, which passed an order permitting Dalit admission that same year. When officials and landlord-run school managements refused to implement it, he called an agricultural labourers’ strike in 1907, widely regarded as among the first organised agricultural strikes in India, telling the landlords that if their children were not allowed to study, weeds would grow in the fields.
Education without discrimination was effectively realised only in 1910. He was nominated to the Sree Moolam Praja Sabha in 1912.

The judgment overruled the earlier position in India Cement vs State of Tamil Nadu (1990). Parliament responded with the MMDR Amendment Act, 2026: introduced 10 August, passed by the Lok Sabha on 12 August and the Rajya Sabha on 13 August, assented 17 August 2026.
It bars states from levying any tax, cess or other levy on mineral rights or mineral-bearing lands except on conditions the Centre prescribes, and invalidates unpaid pre-amendment levies without requiring refund of amounts already collected. Karnataka, Kerala and Telangana are challenging it in the Supreme Court.

Satellite analysis, including by ISRO, points to a glacier collapse or ice-rock avalanche in Tibet, possibly followed by a temporary river blockage and its sudden failure, about 20 km east of the Rasuwagadhi crossing on the Lhende river. A second distinction matters: this is not a textbook GLOF. A GLOF requires a pre-existing glacial lake whose dam fails, and such a lake can be inventoried, monitored and sometimes drained.
An avalanche-dammed impoundment forms and fails within hours and cannot. India has about 15,000 glaciers and nearly 7,500 glacial lakes, with field verification feasible mainly from July to September.