Current Affairs Quiz 9 October 2026

The GST Council is the main forum of fiscal federalism created by the Constitution (One Hundred and First Amendment) Act, 2016. Article 279A makes the Union Finance Minister its chairperson, adds the Union Minister of State in charge of Revenue or Finance, and gives each State a member, the Minister in charge of Finance or Taxation or another Minister the State nominates.

Its voting rule forces bargaining. The Centre’s vote carries one-third of the weight and all the States together carry two-thirds, and a decision needs three-fourths of the weighted votes of those present and voting, so neither side can carry a proposal alone.

Half the members make a quorum. The Council recommends; it does not legislate.

At its 57th meeting it recommended omitting section 69 of the CGST Act (arrest), raising the prosecution threshold from ₹1 crore to ₹5 crore and easing refunds, and the release said these would be given effect through circulars, notifications and law amendments, which alone have the force of law. That is why a Council meeting is reported as a set of recommendations and why the date each change starts matters.

Decriminalisation is the thread of the 57th meeting. Besides omitting section 69 (arrest) and raising the prosecution threshold to ₹5 crore, the Council recommended narrowing the offences in section 132, cutting the maximum general penalty under section 125 from Rs 25,000 to Rs 10,000, and a minimum of Rs 10,000 of tax before a show cause notice issues.

For appeals that involve only a penalty, it proposed a cap of ₹40 crore on the pre-deposit. On refunds, it proposed cutting the time for an acknowledgement or deficiency memo from 15 to 10 days and sanctioning 90% of zero-rated and inverted-duty claims provisionally through the system.

The logic is that of trust-based compliance: punish fraud, not error, and stop locking up working capital. The route matters for the exam.

The Council is a recommending body under Article 279A; the Central law changes only when Parliament amends the CGST Act, and notifications and circulars carry the rest. The recommendations carry some dates: input-services ITC refunds would cover ITC availed on or after 1 November 2026, and capital-goods ITC refunds ITC availed on or after 1 April 2027.

None of these is in force until the law or rules are changed.

India controls medicine prices on two tracks. Scheduled drugs carry ceiling prices fixed by the government.

Non-scheduled drugs have no ceiling, and their trade margins, the margins added as a medicine moves through the supply chain before it reaches the patient, can be very large: NPPA’s analysis of market data found an average mark-up of about 170% on non-scheduled anti-cancer medicines, reaching 700% or more in some cases. Capping the margin is the middle path between leaving prices free and fixing them.

It was tried in February 2019, when the NPPA capped trade margins on 42 selected non-scheduled anti-cancer drugs under Paragraph 19 of the DPCO, 2013, which reduced MRPs by up to 91% and saved a reported ₹984 crore a year across 526 brands. The new decision limits margins to 30% of MRP on non-scheduled anti-cancer drugs, branded and generic, domestic and imported, patented and non-patented, and asks makers to keep production at current levels.

The Department expects prices to fall by up to 70% and patients to save ₹2,500 crore a year. It takes effect only after the DGHS committee settles the list and the NPPA notifies it.

The 2006 judgment in Prakash Singh v. Union of India is the reference point for how States choose and keep a police chief. On the DGP, the law laid down in the case has three parts: a transparent appointment process, a minimum tenure of two years once appointed, and an eligibility floor of six months of residual service before normal retirement, which came with the Court’s clarification of 13 March 2019.

The aim, in The Hindu’s words, is the insulation of the police force from political influence. The case also produced seven directions on police reform, which include State Security Commissions and Police Complaints Authorities.

Now the Union government has moved the Court against Jharkhand’s 2025 rules, which allowed an officer with less than six months of residual service to be considered for the post. A Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant took the prima facie view that the rule runs against Prakash Singh, asked the State to revisit it, and asked its amicus, with the UPSC assisting, to look into other States’ laws and appointments too.

The view is prima facie: the rule has not been struck down, and the matter is pending.

Electoral rolls sit at the meeting point of three Articles and two statutes. Article 324 gives the Election Commission superintendence, direction and control of preparing the rolls; Article 325 provides one general roll for every territorial constituency and forbids exclusion on grounds only of religion, race, caste or sex; Article 326 entitles every citizen of eighteen and above, not otherwise disqualified, to be registered.

The Representation of the People Act, 1950 carries the detail: section 21(3) lets the Commission direct a special revision for reasons to be recorded, and Rule 25(1) of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 allows a revision to be intensive, summary or partly each. The Electoral Registration Officer, not a central database, decides each elector’s eligibility.

Form 6 is the application for inclusion and Form 7 the objection to an entry. In Lal Babu Hussein (1995), a three-judge bench ruling built into the ECI’s Manual, a name on the roll is presumed valid and can be removed only after notice and a hearing.

The Hindu’s editorial reads the Special Intensive Revision against these safeguards and finds the process exclusionary in its effect.

TEPA entered into force on 1 October 2025 and carries an investment objective: USD 100 billion over 15 years and the facilitation of one million direct jobs in India. Its partner is the European Free Trade Association, the four states of Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, not the European Union.

Bharat Joshi’s op-ed in The Hindu asks whether India’s inbound investment framework can deliver on such targets. He points to the four labour codes, in force since 21 November 2025, which rationalise 29 labour laws but need State rules because labour is in the Concurrent List, as PIB records; to Quality Control Orders, which make BIS certification mandatory and which grew, by the Gauba Committee count he cites, from fewer than 70 to nearly 790; and to TEPA’s lack of an independent bilateral investment dispute mechanism.

He credits the Taxation Laws (Amendment) Act, 2021 with ending the ghost of retrospective tax disputes, and says the Commercial Courts Act, 2015 and the Mediation Act, 2023 have helped. The DPIIT is the nodal agency, though not the decision-maker on many approvals.

The argument is that targets attract headlines while predictable rules attract capital.

Stubble burning is a policy problem with three layers. The first is legal: Punjab’s Preservation of Sub-Soil Water Act, enacted in 2009 to slow groundwater depletion, delayed paddy sowing and transplanting, which pushed the harvest into late October and early November and left farmers a narrow window of 10 to 15 days before wheat.

The second is economic: as C.S.C. Sekhar writes, paddy procurement between 2012 and 2024 averaged 87% of production in Punjab and 74% in Haryana against about 37% nationally, which keeps farmers on paddy. The third is the measurement problem.

CREAMS counts active fires from polar-orbiting satellites that pass over India only between 10:30 am and 1:30 pm, while geostationary observation in an ISRO-led study caught evening burning, so a fall in fire counts may reflect a change of timing. In-situ options, such as the Happy Seeder, Super Seeder and Rotavator, short-duration varieties and direct seeding of rice, keep the residue in the field.

Ex-situ options, such as bio-ethanol and compressed biogas, take it away for use. For the 2026 paddy harvest, the Commission for Air Quality Management has, through the CPCB, deployed flying squads in 34 districts, 18 in Punjab and 16 in Haryana.

Article 17 abolishes ‘untouchability’, forbids its practice in any form and makes the enforcement of any disability arising from it an offence. Article 35 then reserves to Parliament the power to prescribe punishment for such offences, which is why the law is a Central one.

That law is the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, which prescribes punishment for enforcing any disability arising from ‘untouchability’. A second Central law, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, was enacted to prevent atrocities against members of SCs and STs.

A committee chaired by the Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, and co-chaired by the Union Minister for Tribal Affairs, reviews how States and UTs implement both Acts. The Parley’s question is whether these guarantees are enough.

Disha Wadekar notes that criminal law requires proof beyond reasonable doubt and looks to civil remedies with a lower burden of proof, as under the POSH Act, and to local forums; Valerian Rodrigues looks to textbooks, teacher training and urban planning that rebuild the common.

Delhi’s winter smog is a problem of emissions multiplied by weather. In his column, Gufran Beig explains the multiplier: a super El Niño can cut wind speed over North India, make western disturbances, the weather systems that bring winter rain to Delhi and wash pollutants out, almost absent, and lower the surface inversion layer, so pollutants build up near the ground.

El Niño adds no smoke of its own; it changes winds, rain and temperature. India’s policy response works at several levels.

The National Clean Air Programme, launched by the MoEFCC in January 2019, covers 131 cities in 24 States with a target of up to 40% reduction in PM10, or meeting the national standards, by 2025-26. In the NCR, the CAQM runs the Graded Response Action Plan, whose revised schedule has four stages and 48 actions.

SAFAR, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, forecasts air quality. Beig’s case is for the airshed, a region that shares the same air and is managed as one unit across city and State lines, since smoke does not stop at a border.

Section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 did not delete the IPC offence of attempted suicide; it presumed, unless proved otherwise, that a person who attempts suicide has severe stress, and barred trial and punishment. Section 115(2) placed a duty on the appropriate Government to provide care, treatment and rehabilitation.

Section 24(1) bars the release to the media, without consent, of a photograph or other information about a person with mental illness undergoing treatment at a mental health establishment. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which repealed the IPC, has no general offence of attempted suicide; its Section 226 punishes only an attempt made to compel or restrain a public servant from discharging official duty, and abetment of suicide remains a serious offence.

The NCRB recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024, 8.5% of all suicides. In Amit Kumar v. Union of India (24 March 2025) the Supreme Court reminded institutions of their obligation to promptly lodge an FIR after a campus suicide, and set up a National Task Force on the mental health of students.

The National Suicide Prevention Strategy (2022) aims to cut suicide mortality by 10% by 2030, and Tele-MANAS (14416) is a free 24x7 helpline.

The NDMA’s guidelines of June 2009 define a snow avalanche as a rapid, down slope movement of a large detached mass of snow, ice and associated debris such as rock fragments, soil and vegetation. There are two basic types, loose snow avalanches and slab avalanches, and slab avalanches account for most of the damage.

Terrain decides much of the risk. Most avalanches of dangerous size originate on slopes of between 30 and 45 degrees, and convex slopes are more susceptible than concave ones.

India’s institutional answer sits with the DRDO, a national level agency for avalanche forecasting. Its Defence Geoinformatics Research Establishment (DGRE) at Chandigarh runs snow-meteorological observatories and automatic weather stations, issues forecasts at least 24 hours ahead and, the government says, has installed an avalanche monitoring radar in North Sikkim.

The column by Maloo and Sutaria in The Indian Express places this against a changing cryosphere: ICIMOD’s Snow Update 2026 found snow cover across the Hindu Kush Himalaya 27.8% below the long-term average, and the HiAVAL database records 681 avalanches between 1972 and 2022. They argue for an open, cross-border observatory network, starting with 100 high-risk locations, whose warnings reach civilians as well as soldiers.

Report-and-publisher pairs are a regular Prelims format, and the trap is usually a plausible swap between bodies of the same family. The World Development Report comes from the World Bank Group; its 2026 edition, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, was launched in New Delhi by the Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology with the IndiaAI Mission, and its framework runs through adoption, adaptation and advancement.

The World Investment Report comes from UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, not from the World Bank or the WTO; the 2026 edition is cited in The Hindu op-ed as ranking India 11th among FDI destinations. Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India is the annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau, which recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024.

The Snow Update Report comes from ICIMOD, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, whose 2026 report found Hindu Kush Himalaya snow cover 27.8% below the long-term average. Learn the publisher with the report, not with the news.