Current Affairs Quiz 2 September 2026

The collegium appears nowhere in the Constitution. Article 124(2) provides for appointment of Supreme Court judges by the President after consultation with such judges as the President deems necessary; Article 217(1) does the same for High Court judges, requiring consultation with the CJI, the Governor and, except for a Chief Justice, the Chief Justice of that High Court.
The First Judges case in 1981 read consultation as not requiring concurrence, giving the executive primacy. The Second Judges case in 1993 overruled it.
The Third Judges case in 1998 fixed composition. Parliament attempted replacement through the 99th Amendment and the NJAC Act in 2014, both struck down in 2015 as violating the basic structure.
The Memorandum of Procedure governing mechanics has remained unfinalised since. Article 223 separately provides for an Acting Chief Justice of a High Court.

A PMI is a diffusion index, not a magnitude measure. Respondents report whether each variable is higher, the same or lower than the previous month, and the headline combines five sub-indices: new orders at 30 per cent, output at 25, employment at 20, suppliers’ delivery times at 15 inverted, and stocks of purchases at 10.
A reading above 50 indicates that more respondents report an increase than a decrease; it does not indicate by how much. Because the index is month-on-month and survey-based, and covers only formal manufacturing firms on the panel, it can diverge sharply from year-on-year national accounts growth covering the whole economy.
India’s manufacturing PMI fell to 52.8 in August 2026 from 53.5 in July, the lowest since August 2021, against a long-run average of 54.2, while Q1 FY27 GDP growth was 7.8 per cent.

Article 262 separately empowers Parliament to provide by law for the adjudication of disputes relating to the waters of inter-State rivers or river valleys, and to provide that neither the Supreme Court nor any other court shall exercise jurisdiction in respect of such a dispute. The two enabling statutes are the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956 and the River Boards Act, 1956.
Article 263 is a different provision altogether, empowering the President to establish an Inter-State Council for inquiry into and advice on disputes and for investigating subjects of common interest; it is advisory and not adjudicatory. The practical consequence of this allocation is that the Union funds, designs and benchmarks water programmes such as Jal Jeevan Mission while the States own and implement them, which is why deliberative forums are the Centre’s main instrument in the sector.

The loss and damage regime is the third pillar of climate action after mitigation and adaptation, and covers harms that adaptation cannot prevent. Its institutional sequence is the Warsaw International Mechanism established at COP19 in 2013, Article 8 of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the Santiago Network for technical assistance at COP25 in 2019, agreement to establish a fund at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, and operationalisation of the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage at COP28 in Dubai in 2023.
The fund is financed by voluntary contributions rather than assessed liability. The underlying principle across the regime is common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, originating in the UNFCCC of 1992 and carried into the Paris Agreement with the qualifier “in the light of different national circumstances”.
The International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion on States’ climate obligations in 2025, following a UN General Assembly request initiated by Vanuatu.

The CRA and the New Development Bank were both agreed in 2014, the NDB at the Fortaleza summit, becoming operational in 2015 with headquarters at Shanghai and a regional centre at Johannesburg. Founding NDB members hold equal voting shares and no member has a veto, which is the design feature usually contrasted with the weighted voting of the IMF and World Bank.
BRICS began as a political grouping of foreign ministers in 2006, held its first standalone summit at Yekaterinburg in 2009, and added South Africa in 2010; the term BRIC itself was coined in 2001 as an investment category. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined on 1 January 2024, and Indonesia in January 2025, taking membership to eleven.
A partner-country category was created in 2024. India assumed its fourth chairship on 1 January 2026 and hosts the 18th summit at Bharat Mandapam on 12 and 13 September 2026.

Transit passage is provided for in Part III of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982. The Strait of Hormuz is the standard example: at its narrowest about 21 nautical miles, roughly 39 kilometres, it lies entirely within the territorial seas of Iran to the north and Oman’s Musandam exclave and the UAE to the south, since a territorial sea extends 12 nautical miles from the baseline.
India is a party to UNCLOS. Iran signed in 1982 but has not ratified, and maintains that transit passage rights under the Convention accrue only to parties; the United States is also not a party but treats transit passage as customary international law. For India the Strait carried about 41 per cent of crude imports in the first nine months of FY2026, about 55 per cent of LNG and about 88 per cent of LPG, with the government stating that about 70 per cent of crude is now routed outside it.

The 74th Constitutional Amendment inserted Part IXA. Article 243ZA vests superintendence, direction and control of elections to municipalities in the State Election Commission, the counterpart of Article 243K for panchayats; a State Election Commissioner is removable only in the manner and on the grounds applicable to a High Court judge. Article 243U fixes a municipal term of five years from the date appointed for the first meeting and requires an election to be completed before its expiry; a dissolved municipality is reconstituted within six months and the new body serves only the remainder of the original term.
Article 243T mandates reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population and not less than one-third of total seats for women, with reserved seats rotated. Rajasthan’s September 2026 round covers 309 bodies, comprising 10 corporations, 47 councils and 252 municipalities, and about 10,245 councillor seats.

The Madhya Pradesh Cabinet’s approval on 1 September 2026 of proposals worth over 41,000 crore rupees illustrates the mechanism: the largest item was implementation of the Viksit Bharat: VB-G RAM G rural employment scheme in the State, effective 1 July 2026, with an estimated outlay of 29,619 crore rupees, of which 3,183 crore is for FY 2026-27 and 26,436 crore for continuation from 2026-27 to 2030-31. Rural employment guarantees operate through panchayat-level demand registration and State-issued work orders, so a central law does not by itself create an obligation on a State treasury.
Article 243G empowers State legislatures to devolve powers to panchayats for economic development and social justice. Other decisions in the same round included the Western Bhopal Bypass, 35.61 km at 3,225.51 crore rupees, and about 2,973 crore rupees for the dairy sector including 1,547 crore for processing capacity.

Under the tinkathia system, cultivators in Champaran were compelled to grow indigo on a fixed proportion of their holding, historically three kathas out of every twenty, for European planters on terms they did not set. The system was already under pressure because synthetic indigo had eroded the market, which led planters to seek compensation from tenants for release from the obligation.
Gandhi’s inquiry recorded thousands of statements, and he was appointed to the official committee that recommended the reform. Motihari, the headquarters of East Champaran district, is the site associated with the campaign and gives its name to Bapudham Motihari.
Champaran was followed by the Kheda Satyagraha and the Ahmedabad mill workers’ strike in 1918, the three campaigns together establishing Gandhi’s national standing before the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919.

Semicon 2.0 was notified on 1 September 2026 with an outlay of 1,27,500 crore rupees, structured on six pillars extending semiconductor policy beyond fabrication to design, packaging, materials, equipment and skills. SEMICON India 2026 runs from 17 to 19 September 2026 under the theme “Transform Tomorrow: Silicon to Systems, Building the Ecosystem”.
The strategic argument behind the widening is that a fabrication plant is capital-intensive and produces a comparatively commoditised wafer, while higher margins sit in design, assembly, testing, marking and packaging, and in system integration. India’s existing strength is in chip design services rather than fabrication, and the Design Linked Incentive scheme addresses that segment specifically.

Foreign Travel Tax was levied under the Finance Act, 1979 and collected by carriers from passengers travelling abroad; the case was M/s Saudi Arabian Airlines v. Union of India. Strict construction of penal statutes is a settled rule of interpretation: where a penal provision is capable of two reasonable constructions, the one favouring the subject is adopted, and the provision is not extended by analogy or by reference to the mischief it was intended to prevent.
The same day the Court held that a clarificatory statement made before a court cannot be treated as an unconditional undertaking for the purpose of contempt proceedings unless it constitutes a solemn, express and unequivocal commitment intended to be acted upon by the court, a ruling resting on the related principle that liability for contempt requires clear notice of the obligation breached.

The Act also constitutes the National Executive Committee, headed by the Home Secretary, the National Institute of Disaster Management for training and research, and the National Disaster Response Force as the specialised response force. Glacial lake outburst floods have become a recurrent Himalayan hazard: meltwater impounded behind moraine dams of loose rock, sediment and buried ice fails when overtopped by an avalanche, destabilised by seismicity, or pressured by extreme rainfall, releasing water, mud, ice and boulders.
Recent Indian and neighbouring events include the Rishi Ganga flood in Uttarakhand in 2021, which damaged two hydropower projects, the Sikkim flood on the Teesta in 2023, which destroyed a dam, and events along the Bhotekoshi and at Dharali in 2025. Risk is usefully decomposed as hazard multiplied by exposure multiplied by vulnerability, of which only the last two are domestically tractable in the short run.

Agriculture accounts for roughly 90 per cent of India’s freshwater withdrawals, so any reallocation that leaves agriculture untouched cannot resolve national water stress. Per capita water availability fell from about 1,816 cubic metres in 2001 to about 1,486 in 2021, against conventional thresholds of 1,700 cubic metres for stress and 1,000 for scarcity.
A second distinction is essential: withdrawal is water taken from a source, consumption is water not returned to it. Cooling water is largely withdrawn and returned, whereas irrigation water is largely consumed through evapotranspiration, so comparing sectors by withdrawal volume alone is misleading.
Institutionally, water is Entry 17 of the State List; the Central Ground Water Board and the Central Ground Water Authority function under the Ministry of Jal Shakti, Atal Bhujal Yojana addresses participatory groundwater management, and NITI Aayog has published the Composite Water Management Index.

Time use evidence shows women’s participation in livestock activities rising from about 11 per cent in 2019 to about 15 per cent in 2024, with no corresponding reduction in unpaid domestic work; the additional productive hours were added rather than exchanged, a condition described as time poverty. The deeper asymmetry is over control: the animal is typically recorded as owned by the male head of household, which determines who can pledge it for institutional credit, who is enrolled in the dairy cooperative or producer organisation, who is invited to extension training, who transacts the sale and into whose account payment is credited.
India’s cooperative dairy structure follows the Anand pattern of village societies, district unions and a state federation, built out through Operation Flood from 1970 under the National Dairy Development Board. India is the world’s largest producer of milk.

Applying these categories, 147 of 315 districts identified as El Nino-vulnerable, spread across 25 States and Union Territories, recorded deficient rainfall on cumulative rainfall from 1 June to 30 August 2026, while 30 recorded excess or large excess. Of the 315, some 111 are high priority because less than 25 per cent of their area is irrigated; among these about 36 per cent were deficient and about 17 per cent in excess.
Drought and flood therefore occurred within the same flagged set in one season, which is why a national aggregate describes neither. El Nino, the warm phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, is associated with but does not determine a weaker Indian southwest monsoon, and its effect can be offset by a positive Indian Ocean Dipole.
Drought declaration in India uses composite indicators including soil moisture, sowing progress and reservoir storage, not rainfall alone.