Current Affairs Quiz 11 October 2026

The right to protest rests on two freedoms: Article 19(1)(a), speech and expression, and Article 19(1)(b), the right to assemble peaceably and without arms. Each has its own restriction clause.

Article 19(2) limits speech and lists public order, decency or morality, contempt of court and defamation among its grounds. Article 19(3) limits assembly, and only in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India or public order.

Section 163 of the BNSS, which replaced Section 144 CrPC and sits in Chapter XI, lets a District Magistrate, a Sub-divisional Magistrate or a specially empowered Executive Magistrate issue a written prohibitory order stating the material facts. It may be passed ex parte in an emergency and may not last more than two months, though the State Government may extend it by notification for a further period of up to six months to prevent danger to life or a riot.

The case law points one way: Himat Lal K. Shah (1972) held that the State can only make regulations in aid of the right of assembly; Ramlila Maidan (2012) required an actual and prominent threat before preventive steps; Amit Sahni (2020) tied protest to designated places.

Article 324(5) leaves the conditions of service and tenure of the Election Commissioners and the Regional Commissioners to rules made by the President, subject to any law made by Parliament. Its proviso gives the Chief Election Commissioner two protections.

First, the CEC shall not be removed from office except in like manner and on the like grounds as a Judge of the Supreme Court. Second, the CEC’s conditions of service shall not be varied to his disadvantage after appointment.

The judges’ route is in Article 124(4): an order of the President passed after an address by each House of Parliament, supported by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting, presented in the same session, on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity. Together, the two protections make the CEC’s tenure as secure as a Supreme Court judge’s. In the Delhi protests of October 2026, protesters demanded the CEC’s resignation over the deletion of names from electoral rolls, as The Hindu reports.

The Supreme Court’s Sunday sitting dealt with detentions, movement and the internet, not with that demand.

Article 356 lets the President, on a report from the Governor of a State or otherwise, assume the functions of the State government when satisfied that the government of the State cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution. The Proclamation ceases to operate after two months unless both Houses of Parliament approve it, and continued approval extends it in steps of six months, but no Proclamation may remain in force for more than three years in any case, subject to further conditions in the Article.

S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (11 March 1994) is the landmark: Justice Jeevan Reddy’s summary of conclusions records that a Proclamation under Article 356(1) ‘is not immune from judicial review’ and calls the power ‘a conditioned power’. Pakistan’s parallel is Article 234, called Governor’s rule, not President’s rule.

There, the Governor’s report is named, a joint sitting of Parliament approves the Proclamation, it lapses after two months unless approved, and its outer limit is six months, extended up to two months at a time. On 11 October 2026, Pakistan’s President approved emergency and Governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, under its Articles 232 and 234, Dawn reported.

The Living Planet Report is published by WWF, and its Living Planet Index is produced by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). The 2026 edition, subtitled The Science of Hope, follows 35,803 populations of 5,790 vertebrate species: amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles.

It finds a 73% average decline between 1970 and 2022, an average fall of 2.5% a year. The index tracks relative abundance, not head counts, so a fall from 20,000 to 10,000 and a fall from 200 to 100 weigh the same.

It does not mean 73% fewer animals, and it does not mean 73% of species are declining: around half the populations are stable or increasing, but the losses elsewhere are larger. By realm, freshwater fell most (85%), then terrestrial (69%) and marine (59%).

By region, Latin America and the Caribbean fell most (95%) and Europe and Central Asia least (23%); the regional indices use IPBES regions and leave out marine populations. The 2024 report also headlined 73%, but for 1970 to 2020, so the two editions cannot be read as a two-year trend.

The report gives no India-specific LPI figure.

IPPAS, the International Physical Protection Advisory Service, is the IAEA’s advisory service on nuclear security. In the IAEA’s own description it is ‘an IAEA advisory service provided to Member States, upon their request, in support of their efforts to establish and maintain effective national nuclear security regimes’.

Established in 1995, it focuses on the physical protection of nuclear and other radioactive material, associated facilities and associated activities. A mission allows for a confidential peer-to-peer exchange of experiences and good practices, and its advice helps a State meet international obligations such as the A/CPPNM, the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and its Amendment, and UN Security Council Resolution 1540.

Because the host State requests the mission and it works as a confidential exchange of advice, an IPPAS mission is not a certificate of a country’s nuclear security. According to PTI, the first IPPAS mission to Pakistan, a 12-day visit by a seven-member team, ended on 9 October 2026, and its site visits included the KANUPP Decommissioning Project.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) was agreed in 2022 by almost every country through the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), not the climate convention. It sets 23 targets for 2030, and its four goals for 2050 include ‘increasing the abundance of native wild species to healthy and resilient levels’, which is the very quantity the Living Planet Index tracks.

Its best-known target is Target 3, often called 30x30: ‘Ensure and enable that by 2030 at least 30 per cent of terrestrial, inland water, and of coastal and marine areas ... are effectively conserved and managed’. The target therefore covers land, inland waters and the sea together, not only forests or protected land.

The Living Planet Report 2026 names as a key strength of the framework that, going beyond traditional conservation, it ‘calls for a whole-of-society approach’. The report itself finds a 73% average decline in monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2022, with the steepest fall in freshwater (85%).

For Prelims, separate the conventions: the CBD covers biodiversity, the UNFCCC climate change.

The International Day of the Girl Child falls on 11 October. The UN General Assembly declared it through Resolution 66/170, adopted on 19 December 2011.

The UN traces the idea to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which countries unanimously adopted at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and calls the Beijing Declaration ‘the first to specifically call out girls’ rights’. The 2026 theme is ‘End child marriage and invest in girls’ rights!'.

The UN’s own page says that more than 12 million girls are married before reaching adulthood every year, roughly one every three seconds, with the highest prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa at 31 per cent. For Mains, the UN’s theme ties ending child marriage to investing in girls’ rights.

In GS1, it belongs with the role of women, social empowerment and population issues; in GS2, with the welfare of vulnerable sections and the mechanisms meant to protect them.

Prakash Singh v. Union of India (2006) is the Supreme Court judgment that set out directions on police reform. A State Security Commission is to lay down broad policies and give directions for the preventive tasks and service-oriented functions of the police, and its recommendations are binding on the State Government.

The Director General of Police is to be selected by the State Government from the three senior-most officers of the department empanelled for promotion to that rank by the UPSC, and once selected is to have a minimum tenure of at least two years irrespective of the date of superannuation. A Police Establishment Board in each State decides transfers, postings, promotions and other service-related matters of officers of and below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police; it is a departmental body of the DGP and four other senior officers.

At the Union level, a National Security Commission is to prepare a panel for selecting the chiefs of the Central Police Organisations, who should also have a minimum tenure of two years. Yashovardhan Jha Azad’s Indian Express column on the Delhi protests returns to this reform agenda, including the State Security Commission.

El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), linked to a periodic warming of sea-surface temperatures across the central and east-central equatorial Pacific. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center declares the onset of an El Niño episode when the three-month average sea-surface temperature departure exceeds 0.5 °C in the east-central equatorial Pacific.

In India, El Niño is read mainly as a drought signal for the southwest monsoon. Tamil Nadu’s calendar is different.

IMD describes the northeast monsoon of October to December as ushered in by the return of the north-easterly trade winds over South Asia, associated with the southward movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The South Peninsula receives about 30% of its annual rainfall in this season, and Tamil Nadu about 48%.

R. Venkatesan’s column in The Hindu examines why Tamil Nadu may feel El Niño differently from the rest of India, and our explainer reads it alongside IMD’s 2026 northeast monsoon outlook. For Prelims, keep the two monsoons, their months and the regions they serve apart.