Current Affairs Quiz 7 October 2026

India plans roads, railways, ports, airports and urban transport through separate ministries, each with its own pipeline. GatiShakti put their plans on one GIS map, and the National Logistics Policy set targets for lower logistics costs, but neither created a permanent technical body that owns a long-term multi-modal plan and checks projects against it.

ITLA is designed to fill that gap: it will check ministries’ five-year and annual plans for consistency with the master plan, appraise large projects technically, monitor them and assess their impact after completion. Its value will depend on whether its appraisal can actually reshape projects, how its role is divided from GatiShakti’s Network Planning Group, and whether States, which control much of urban mobility and State highways, plan with it.

The limits from April 2025 are: micro, investment up to Rs 2.5 crore and turnover up to Rs 10 crore; small, Rs 25 crore and Rs 100 crore; medium, Rs 125 crore and Rs 500 crore. The composite test (both investment and turnover) replaced the old investment-only criterion in 2020, and the 2025 revision raised the limits so that firms are not pushed out of a category by inflation and growth.

The SME Growth Fund targets the small and medium end because most existing support, such as credit guarantees and start-up funds of funds, reaches micro and early-stage firms. It is to operate as an Alternative Investment Fund regulated by SEBI; SME funds fall under Category I AIFs under the AIF Regulations, 2012.

Astronomers have three kinds of messenger from deep space besides neutrinos. Light can be absorbed by dust and gas.

Charged cosmic rays are bent by magnetic fields and so do not point home. Gravitational waves come only from violent mass movements such as merging black holes.

Neutrinos interact so weakly that they escape dense regions and cross the universe in straight lines, but that same weakness makes them very hard to catch: IceCube instruments a cubic kilometre of ice between 1,450 and 2,450 metres deep at the South Pole and still sees cosmic neutrinos only rarely. It found the first evidence of high-energy neutrinos from beyond the solar system in 2013.

India recorded atmospheric neutrinos at Kolar Gold Fields in 1965, and the India-based Neutrino Observatory planned in Theni, Tamil Nadu, remains stalled.

The refractive index of a medium tells how much light slows in it; for water and ice it is about 1.3. A charged particle moving faster than c divided by that index emits a cone of light, much as a supersonic aircraft trails a shock wave.

The cone’s angle reveals the particle’s direction, which is why Cherenkov detectors can trace a neutrino back across the sky. The same blue glow is visible in the water of nuclear reactor pools.

Detectors such as Super-Kamiokande in Japan (water) and IceCube (ice) rely on it, and so do ground-based gamma-ray telescopes that watch for Cherenkov flashes in the atmosphere, such as MACE at Hanle in Ladakh.

The acquisition procedure ranks categories so that Indian design is considered first: Buy (Indian-IDDM), then Buy (Indian), then Buy and Make (Indian), then Buy and Make with a foreign vendor, and only then Buy (Global). Each category carries a minimum indigenous content, and contracts often specify more, as the BrahMos deal does.

BrahMos Aerospace is a joint venture of DRDO and Russia’s NPO Mashinostroyenia; the missile is the Navy’s primary surface-to-surface strike weapon. The positive indigenisation lists, which bar import of listed items after set dates, work alongside these categories.

A navy that intends to operate across the Indian Ocean, from the Gulf of Aden to the Malacca Strait, is limited by how long its ships can stay at sea. Fleet support ships extend that reach by transferring fuel and stores to warships sailing alongside.

The HSL-built ships will also carry first-line maintenance workshops, a helicopter deck for multi-role helicopters and self-defence systems. To build them, HSL upgraded Slipway-4 to take ships of up to 45,000 deadweight tonnes and installed a 300-tonne Goliath crane made by L&T Geostructure with Konecranes, which allows modern block construction.

Every one of these engines is of foreign design, which is the core of India’s propulsion gap. Koraput, set up in 1964, has built and overhauled engines for the MiG-21, MiG-27, MiG-29 and Su-30MKI, overhauling more than 9,000; HAL is raising AL-31FP output from 30 to 50 a year against a 2024 order for 240.

The indigenous Kaveri engine, begun for the Tejas, did not reach the thrust needed, and an indigenous engine for the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft is now the main goal. A fighter engine needs single-crystal superalloys, thermal-barrier coatings and advanced cooling, which only a few countries have mastered.

Census 2027 runs in two phases: houselisting and housing, then population enumeration, which for most of India takes place in February 2027. Snow-bound areas of Ladakh, J&K, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand follow a non-synchronous schedule, counted in September.

This round also offered self-enumeration (17 to 31 August) before enumerators visited, because it is the first digital Census. Enumeration has been advanced in four poll-bound States (Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Goa) to 16 November 2026 to 4 January 2027, and deferred in Manipur.

Provisional data is expected by March-April 2027. Census figures drive fund transfers, reservation of seats and, because of the freeze in Articles 82 and 170, the next delimitation.

The freeze was introduced so that States which controlled population growth, largely in the south, would not lose seats to faster-growing States. The 84th Amendment allowed the boundaries of constituencies within a State to be redrawn on the 1991 Census without changing the number of seats per State, and the 87th Amendment (2003) changed that basis to the 2001 Census.

The reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes also follows Census figures. A post-2026 Census therefore reopens the inter-State allocation question, which southern States have raised in the context of federal balance.

The 2003 resolution sought the arrest of editors of The Hindu for an editorial treated as a breach of privilege of the entire House. The reference turned out to be pointless because the Assembly had withdrawn the resolution in 2004, which the Court had not noticed.

The underlying tension is old: in the Searchlight case (1959) the Supreme Court held that privileges under Article 194(3) prevail over the freedom of speech in Article 19(1)(a), while the Keshav Singh reference (1965) held that courts can examine the legality of a commitment for contempt. Without codification, a legislature is the judge in its own cause, which is why the press has long urged that privileges be defined by law.

Air Marshal Dixit is now Vice Chief of the Air Staff and earlier served as Chief of Integrated Defence Staff to the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, and as AOC-in-C of Central Air Command. He was commissioned into the fighter stream in 1986, has more than 3,500 flying hours including on the Tejas, and is an experimental test pilot.

Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh superannuates on 31 October. The Department of Military Affairs was set up to promote jointness, and the CDS, as permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, is the principal military adviser to the Defence Minister.

The arrangement for COP31 is unusual: Türkiye hosts the conference in Antalya, while Australia leads the negotiations and the Pacific hosts the preparatory meetings, a compromise that ended a deadlock between the two bidders. India used the Pre-COP to press the developing-country view that mitigation targets cannot be separated from finance, and to offer Pacific Island countries its expertise in coastal mapping, shoreline monitoring and early warning through ISRO, NCSCM and NCCR.

The Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, which India’s Environment Minister visited, illustrates the adaptation finance that small islands say they need most.

Services produce more than half of India’s gross value added, but until this year they had no monthly output index comparable to the IIP, so analysts relied on proxies such as GST collections, air traffic and bank credit. The trial ISP tracks 19 service sub-sectors.

Government and other non-market services are hard to add because they have no sale price; statisticians usually measure their output by inputs such as salaries, or by volume indicators such as students enrolled or patients treated, which the approach paper will now try to construct. A broader ISP would improve quarterly GDP estimates and help the RBI read the economy in real time.

CAQM replaced the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority, which had been set up in 1998 under the Environment (Protection) Act on the Supreme Court’s direction. It was first created by an ordinance in 2020 and then by the 2021 Act, which gives it power over the whole NCR and adjoining areas of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, and overriding authority on air quality matters there.

It prescribes an approved fuel list for NCR industry and enforces the Graded Response Action Plan. The camera order shifts enforcement from occasional inspections to continuous remote monitoring, building on the CPCB’s earlier requirement of cameras and Online Continuous Emission Monitoring Systems at stacks.

The troposphere extends to about 8 km at the poles and about 18 km at the equator. Above it, the stable, dry stratosphere suits long-endurance platforms: there is little weather, and winds are weaker at some heights.

A stratospheric airship can watch a wide area for long periods, acting as a cheaper, recoverable alternative to a satellite for surveillance or communications relay. DRDO’s platform is being developed by the Aerial Delivery Research and Development Establishment, Agra, which also designed the Advanced High-Altitude Parachute that made its maiden live jump at Nyoma in Ladakh.

Hormuz lies between Iran and the Musandam peninsula of Oman and carries a large share of the world’s seaborne oil, including much of India’s crude and LPG imports from the Gulf. Bab-el-Mandeb, between Yemen and Djibouti and Eritrea, controls the route to the Suez Canal, and was the scene of attacks on shipping in 2023-24.

Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia’s Sumatra, is the main link between the Indian Ocean and East Asia. India has a large stake in all three because Indian seafarers form one of the biggest national groups in the world’s merchant fleet, which is why every attack in these waters becomes a consular concern as well as an energy one.

Ebola was first identified in 1976 near the Ebola river in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fruit bats are thought to be the natural reservoir.

Because it spreads through body fluids, health workers and those who prepare bodies for burial face the highest risk, and safe burial practices are central to control. A vaccine, Ervebo, protects against the Zaire species of the virus.

Under the International Health Regulations (2005), countries must report such events to the World Health Organization; India screens travellers from affected countries at entry points.

Allied and healthcare professionals include medical laboratory and radiology technologists, physiotherapists, optometrists, nutritionists, operation theatre technologists and many others; they form a large share of the health workforce but long worked without uniform standards or a national register. The NCAHP Act, 2021 set up the Commission and State councils.

The new regulations give each State council four autonomous boards (undergraduate, postgraduate, assessment and rating, ethics and registration) of 10 to 20 members, with three-member inspection teams and public ratings of institutions, and a Central Assessment Committee of 10 to 30 members where a State has no working council.