Current Affairs Quiz 12 September 2026

FACT: Statements 1 and 3 are correct. India assumed the BRICS Chairship on 1 January 2026, succeeding Brazil (which hosted the 17th Summit at Rio de Janeiro in July 2025), and the 2026 theme is “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”.
Statement 2 is INCORRECT on the date: the January 2024 cohort was Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE; Indonesia was inducted a year later, from January 2025. ANALYSIS: Official BRICS material and the Government of India Chairship listing name eleven full members in 2026, that is Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia.
Saudi Arabia has never publicly confirmed formal accession, so independent reporting describes its status as ambiguous, but it is listed as a member and is not a Partner Country.

FACT: The three bilateral meetings on 11 September 2026 on the eve of the plenary were with Vladimir Putin, Masoud Pezeshkian and Antonio Guterres. President Cyril Ramaphosa arrived in New Delhi on 11 September 2026 and received a ceremonial welcome, but no bilateral with the Prime Minister was held that day.
ANALYSIS: The Day-Zero focus was on Russia, Iran and the UN Secretary-General.

FACT: The NDB is headquartered in Shanghai, China, and is currently headed by Dilma Rousseff, former President of Brazil, appointed in 2023. K V Kamath (India) was the NDB’s founding President from 2015 to 2020, not the current President.
ANALYSIS: (a) is wrong on the city; (c) confuses the 2014 Fortaleza founding agreement location with the HQ location; (d) confuses the GIFT City regional office with the HQ.

FACT: The target announced at INNOPROM India 2026 in New Delhi is USD 100 billion in bilateral trade and USD 50 billion in two-way investment by 2030. The Indian co-chair was Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal; the Russian co-chair was Minister of Industry and Trade Anton Alikhanov.
ANALYSIS: Current bilateral trade is approximately USD 60 billion, so the incremental target is about USD 40 billion, most of which must come from non-oil sectors to be structurally sustainable.

FACT: The INSTC was signed at St. Petersburg in September 2000 by India, Russia and Iran. It is a 7,200 km multimodal (sea, rail and road) corridor linking Indian ports (Mumbai, Chabahar) to Russia (St. Petersburg) via Iran and the Caspian Sea.
ANALYSIS: (b) is wrong; Kazakhstan is not a founding signatory of the INSTC. (c) is wrong on the venue and one signatory. (d) is wrong on both signatories and venue.

FACT: On 10 September 2026, a bench of Justices J. B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran directed FSSAI to file within 10 days a scientifically justified timeline for Phase II of Front-of-Package Labelling, and separately asked FSSAI to clarify whether a composite red hexagon or a nutrient-wise separate hexagon design would be used. The next hearing is on 28 September 2026.
ANALYSIS: (a) is wrong on both the bench and the substance. (c) and (d) are outside the scope of the order.

FACT: The NOVA classification was developed by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It classifies foods into four groups: (1) unprocessed or minimally processed foods, (2) processed culinary ingredients, (3) processed foods, and (4) ultra-processed foods (UPFs).
ANALYSIS: NOVA is a processing-based taxonomy that complements nutrient-based labelling; UPFs are defined by industrial formulation with additives, not by nutrient content alone.

FACT: Schizopygopsis waddellii, a cold-adapted high-altitude snowtrout, was recorded for the first time in India from Pangkang Teng Tso Lake in Tawang district, Arunachal Pradesh, at an altitude of approximately 12,800 feet (3,900 metres). Identification used integrative taxonomy combining morphology with mitochondrial DNA analysis.
The lead institution was ICAR-CICFR, Bhimtal. ANALYSIS: The other options name real snowtrout species but with fictional or incorrect location assignments.

FACT: The 41st tunnel breakthrough on 11 September 2026 completed Escape Tunnel-1, which is 10.847 km long, running between Dhalwala and Neer Gaddu. This is the project’s second-longest tunnel.
Total tunnel excavation on the 125 km line now stands at approximately 205.82 km of a target 213 km (~97 per cent). ANALYSIS: Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL) is the executing agency under the Ministry of Railways.

FACT: The 50:50 joint venture, valued at approximately Rs 1,800 crore, was signed between Cochin Shipyard Ltd (CSL) and Drydocks World (DDW), a subsidiary of DP World headquartered in Dubai, on 11 September 2026 on the sidelines of the 18th BRICS Summit. The JV consolidates and expands the International Ship Repair Facility (ISRF) at Kochi.
Signatories: CSL CMD Jose V. J. and DDW CEO Capt. Rado Antolovic. ANALYSIS: (a), (b) and (c) name real companies but are not part of this JV.

FACT: On 12 September 1897, 21 soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army, led by Havildar Ishar Singh, defended the Saragarhi communication post between Fort Lockhart and Fort Gulistan in the North-West Frontier against an estimated 10,000 to 14,000 Afridi and Orakzai Pashtun tribesmen. All 21 fell in action and were posthumously awarded the Indian Order of Merit (equivalent to today’s Param Vir Chakra).
ANALYSIS: The other options list fictional or misattributed engagements.

FACT: Southern Railway achieved 100 per cent broad-gauge electrification on 9 September 2026 following the statutory inspection of the 71 km Pattukkottai-Karaikkudi section in Tamil Nadu. Total broad-gauge network: 5,068 route km.
The 46 km Nilgiri Mountain Railway (UNESCO World Heritage) is a metre-gauge rack railway and sits outside the broad-gauge network entirely. ANALYSIS: (b) is wrong because the Nilgiri Mountain Railway is not part of the broad-gauge network whose electrification was completed, so it is not the final BG section. (c) and (d) were electrified earlier.

FACT: SEBI’s consultation paper proposes a Closing Auction Session (CAS) framework in which the expiry-day settlement price is derived from a Blended VWAP combining trades from the final 30 minutes of continuous trading and a subsequent 10-minute closing auction. The objective is to dampen expiry-day volatility spikes.
ANALYSIS: The other options describe alternative but not-proposed compositions.

FACT: Submarine (undersea) cables carry more than 95 per cent of global digital traffic. The TRUST (Transforming the Relationship Utilising Strategic Technologies) initiative was first announced during Prime Minister Modi’s February 2025 visit to Washington; its extension to submarine cable security aligns with the Quad Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience.
ANALYSIS: Concentration risk exists on a small number of cable-lay and repair vendors globally, which is the strategic vulnerability the framework addresses.

FACT: The Colombo Security Conclave was originally established in 2011 by India, Sri Lanka and Maldives, and was later expanded to include Mauritius and Bangladesh. The Visakhapatnam table-top exercise (9 to 12 September 2026) covered maritime terrorism, narcotics smuggling, human trafficking and IUU fishing, along with information-sharing SOPs and Maritime Domain Awareness.
ANALYSIS: (b), (c) and (d) misstate the founding members; Mauritius and Bangladesh joined later.