Current Affairs Quiz 31 August 2026

The SCO was founded on 15 June 2001 at Shanghai by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, building on the Shanghai Five grouping of 1996. Uzbekistan was the member added to the Shanghai Five to create the SCO. India and Pakistan were admitted together in 2017 at the Astana summit, Iran in 2023 and Belarus in 2024, taking membership to ten.
Russian and Chinese are the two official languages. The chairmanship rotates annually and the chair hosts the leaders summit.
The 26th summit met at Bishkek on 31 August and 1 September 2026, in the organisation twenty-fifth year, with Pakistan due to take the rotating chairmanship after it and host in 2027. RATS coordinates member-state action against terrorism, separatism and extremism, the three evils in SCO language, principally through information exchange rather than operational deployment.

The NSG is a voluntary export-control cartel formed in 1975 in response to India nuclear test of 1974, so the 2008 waiver was the group setting aside a rule created because of India. India signed the 123 Agreement with the United States in 2008 and has civil nuclear cooperation agreements with several suppliers including Russia, France, Canada, Kazakhstan, Namibia, Mongolia and Argentina.
India has signed but not ratified nothing on the CTBT: it has neither signed nor ratified it. Domestic uranium reserves are limited in grade and quantity relative to programme ambitions, which is the structural reason import diplomacy matters.
India had been importing Uzbek uranium under a 2019 contract for 1,100 metric tonnes of natural uranium concentrate running through 2026, and the Tashkent visit produced a framework for a successor arrangement plus a memorandum on mining and geological resources, not a signed supply contract.

The Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 designates the RBI as the authority for regulation and supervision of payment systems in India and requires authorisation for operating one. NPCI was incorporated in 2008 as a not-for-profit company promoted by a group of banks with RBI and Indian Banks Association support, and is today a Section 8 company under the Companies Act, 2013.
It runs UPI, RuPay, IMPS, AePS, NACH, FASTag and BHIM. UPI overseas acceptance is not the same thing as rupee internationalisation and not the same as a full domestic UPI deployment in the host country: merchant QR interoperability means an Indian user can pay a foreign merchant using an Indian app. India offers Indians a 30-day visa-free regime in Uzbekistan, with 14 weekly direct flights, four Indian universities operating there and about 16,000 Indian students enrolled.

The eight core industries, in the order used by the index, are coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilisers, steel, cement and electricity. The July 2026 data, released on 20 August, showed growth of 5.4 per cent, easing from 6 per cent in June, with cumulative growth of 4.3 per cent over April to July 2026 against 1.5 per cent in the corresponding four months a year earlier.
Cement rose 13.1 per cent and electricity 9 per cent, while crude oil, natural gas and fertilisers contracted. The analytically important habit is to read a single strong month against the cumulative series: a low base in the comparison period flatters the current year, which is exactly why both cumulative figures should be quoted together.

Quarterly and annual national accounts are compiled by the National Statistics Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. GDP at constant prices strips out price change and is the series quoted as growth.
The Q1 FY2026-27 estimate, released on 31 August 2026, showed real GDP growth of 7.8 per cent and real GVA growth of 8.2 per cent, beating ICRA’s 6.4 to 6.6 per cent forecast and the broad consensus near 7 to 7.2 per cent. The same release measures the year-ago quarter at 6.9 per cent, although it was first estimated at 7.8 per cent in August 2025, a reminder that quarterly estimates are provisional and are revised as fuller data replaces first-pass indicators.
When GVA growth runs above GDP growth, as in this quarter, net product taxes grew slower than output, which is the wedge between the two measures.

The cane price stack has three layers. The FRP is the central statutory minimum a mill must pay.
The State Advised Price is a state declaration above it, with no central statutory backing, which has generated recurring litigation about whether states can mandate it. The minimum selling price of sugar, a floor below which mills may not sell, has been Rs 31 per kg since February 2019 against an industry-estimated production cost near Rs 40 at the current FRP, and ISMA has sought about Rs 41.66.
That frozen spread is the structural reason mills favour ethanol, whose procurement price is administered separately and has moved. Gross production for 2025-26 was revised from about 343.5 lakh tonnes to near 306 to 309.5 lakh tonnes on differing official and industry estimates, on waterlogging in Maharashtra and Karnataka and red rot and top-borer in Uttar Pradesh, with roughly 27.5 to 30 lakh tonnes diverted to ethanol.

The Ethanol Blended Petrol Programme operates under the National Policy on Biofuels, 2018, amended in 2022. The E20 target, originally set for 2030, was advanced to 2025 and achieved in 2025.
India is now moving in phased fashion toward E25, E27 and E30, with the Bureau of Indian Standards directed to develop the E27 fuel standard and ARAI tasked by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways with studying engine modification. Feedstocks are not interchangeable in their food consequences: cane juice and B-heavy molasses draw directly on sweetener that could have been sugar, C-heavy molasses is a residue further down the chain, surplus grain engages the food system differently again, and second-generation ethanol from agricultural residue barely engages it at all.
That is why a single verdict on ethanol is not analytically available.

The RBI circular of 26 April 2021 on corporate governance in banks set the outer limits within which any private bank succession operates. An MD and CEO or whole-time director who is not a promoter or major shareholder may hold the post for a maximum of 15 consecutive years, after which reappointment in the same bank requires a minimum gap of three years.
A promoter or major-shareholder MD and CEO is capped at 12 years, extendable to 15 at the sole discretion of the RBI in extraordinary circumstances. No person may continue beyond the age of 70.
Banks had until 1 October 2021 to comply. Jagdishan announced on 29 August 2026 that he would not seek reappointment and would retire on 26 October 2026; he had taken office in October 2020, succeeding Aditya Puri, who led the bank from 1994.

The RBI 2025 D-SIB list, based on data as of 31 March 2025, retained State Bank of India in bucket 4 with an additional CET1 requirement of 0.80 per cent of risk-weighted assets, HDFC Bank in bucket 2 at 0.40 per cent, and ICICI Bank in bucket 1 at 0.20 per cent, unchanged from the 2024 bucketing. The capital requirements take effect from 1 April 2027.
Banks are placed in buckets by a systemic importance score built from size, interconnectedness, substitutability and complexity. No Indian bank currently appears on the FSB list of globally systemically important banks.
HDFC Limited merged into HDFC Bank with effect from 1 July 2023, a reverse merger that left the bank with a large book of long-tenure mortgages to be funded by deposits.

EOS-05, also designated GISAT-1A, is scheduled for launch on 4 September 2026 on GSLV-F17 from the Second Launch Pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. It has a mass of 2,367 kg and is injected into a Sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit before raising to geostationary altitude.
It replaces EOS-03, also called GISAT-1, lost in a launch failure in 2021, and the mission ends an ISRO launch pause of close to seven months. A geostationary satellite cannot usefully image the poles, because at 36,000 km over the equator the polar regions are seen at extreme oblique angles or not at all, which is precisely why polar-orbiting sun-synchronous platforms remain necessary.
Geostationary orbits also require regular station-keeping against lunar and solar perturbations and the Earth equatorial bulge.

India signed the Javelin LOA on 28 August 2026, valued at about 45.7 million United States dollars, covering 100 Javelin rounds, one missile for fly-to-buy evaluation, and 25 Javelin Lightweight Command Launch Units, along with training equipment, simulation rounds, a battery coolant unit, technical manuals, lifecycle support, spares and systems integration. The FGM-148 Javelin is a man-portable, fire-and-forget anti-tank guided missile built by the Javelin Joint Venture of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, using an imaging infrared seeker so the missile guides itself after launch and the operator can displace immediately.
In February 2026 Bharat Dynamics Limited and the Javelin Joint Venture agreed to explore manufacturing the missile in India. A hundred rounds is an evaluation-scale buy, so the strategically consequential element is the co-production track rather than the purchase itself.

The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992 inserted Part IXA and the Twelfth Schedule, which lists 18 functions of urban local bodies. Article 243Q provides three categories: a Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, a Municipal Council for a smaller urban area and a Municipal Corporation for a larger urban area.
Article 243U gives a municipality a term of five years from the date appointed for its first meeting and requires elections to be completed before that term expires, which is the provision courts invoke against states that delay local polls. Articles 243T and 243D reserve seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population and reserve not less than one-third of seats for women, while leaving backward class reservation to the state legislature.
Rajasthan polls cover 10,245 councillor seats across 309 urban local bodies, on a schedule released on 19 August 2026.

The Himalaya are an active collisional belt where the Indian plate continues to converge with Eurasia, accommodated on the Main Central Thrust, Main Boundary Thrust and Main Frontal Thrust, which is why much of the belt falls in seismic zones IV and V. Mean temperature over the Hindu Kush Himalaya rose about 0.28 degrees Celsius per decade between 1951 and 2020, with amplified warming above four kilometres at roughly 0.34 degrees per decade, and sustained glacier retreat has increased both the number and volume of glacial lakes. ICIMOD, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development based at Kathmandu, warned in its Hindu Kush Himalaya Monsoon Outlook 2026 of a hotter, drier season with long dry spells and sudden cloudbursts.
India disaster architecture rests on the Disaster Management Act, 2005, with the National Disaster Management Authority chaired by the Prime Minister.

India ratified ICERD in 1968 and appeared before CERD on 11 and 12 August 2026, its first review since 2007, on its combined twelfth to twenty-first periodic reports submitted in 2023, with an inter-ministerial delegation led by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta. Article 1(1) of the Convention defines racial discrimination by reference to race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
The single contested word is descent: India has argued since the 2001 Durban conference that caste is social stratification rather than descent within the Convention meaning, while the committee General Recommendation of 2002 held that descent includes caste and analogous systems of inherited status. The Universal Periodic Review is a separate mechanism conducted by the Human Rights Council, an inter-governmental body of member states, not by a treaty body of experts.

The frozen sugar selling floor is the structural fact behind the 2026 ethanol argument. The Fair and Remunerative Price for cane has risen to Rs 355 per quintal for 2025-26 while the sugar minimum selling price has not moved since February 2019, against an industry-estimated production cost near Rs 40 per kg, and ISMA has sought about Rs 41.66.
Ethanol procurement prices are administered separately and have moved. Writing in the Indian Express, Ashok Gulati and Tanmoy Adhikari of ICRIER argued that the August 2026 sugar spike exposes structural faults in the ethanol programme and recommended cutting the refined sugar import duty from 100 per cent to between 0 and 5 per cent temporarily.
The government, ISMA and the distillers association reply that ethanol share of the crop actually fell while gross output collapsed for weather and pest reasons. Both are correct, because they answer different questions: the criticism is about the loss of buffer, not about causation.