Current Affairs Quiz 14 October 2026

IDBI Bank’s poor financial health required repeated infusions of capital, first by the Government of India and later by LIC. The RBI placed it under the Prompt Corrective Action framework in May 2017 and lifted the restrictions in March 2021.

After LIC acquired 51% of its paid-up equity capital, the RBI categorised it as a private sector bank for regulatory purposes from January 2019, and in May 2021 the CCEA gave in-principle approval for strategic disinvestment with transfer of management control. Now the CCEA has approved 10955230 Canada Inc., whose parent is Fairfax Financial Holdings, as the Strategic Buyer of a 60.72% stake (30.48% from the Government and 30.24% from LIC) for Rs 52,878.08 crore, at Rs 81 per share against a benchmark of Rs 75.99.

The Government will keep 15% and LIC 19%, and both will withdraw their nominees from the Board. The buyer must still clear the RBI’s Fit and Proper assessment, so this is an approval, not a completed sale.

The Government says that, once completed, it will be the largest FDI in the financial sector so far.

The Union Cabinet has approved the continuation of the National Social Assistance Programme for five years, 2026-27 to 2030-31, with an outlay of Rs 53,428 crore, and renamed it the Pradhan Mantri Samajik Sahayata Yojana. The old-age, widow and disability pension schemes become the PM Vridhavastha, PM Vidhawa and PM Divyangjan Pension Yojanas, and the family benefit scheme becomes the PM Parivar Labh Yojana.

The real change is in the disability pension. Eligibility was tied to 80% disability; it now moves to the 40% benchmark disability of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and the pension will be available from birth.

The 2016 Act also requires assistance under such schemes to be at least 25% higher than similar schemes for others. The approval reaches 3.20 crore beneficiaries across 36 States and UTs, but the new criteria and rates take effect through guidelines due within three months.

Keep the constitutional map straight: Article 41 is the Directive, relief of the disabled is State List entry 9, and old age pensions sit in Concurrent List entry 24.

The Madras High Court ruling keeps two routes out of a legislature apart. Under Article 190(3)(b), a State legislator’s seat falls vacant when a written resignation is accepted by the Speaker; the proviso, inserted by the Constitution (Thirty-third Amendment) Act, 1974, bars acceptance if the Speaker is satisfied that the resignation is not voluntary or genuine.

The Tenth Schedule is a different process: under paragraph 2 a member is disqualified for voluntarily giving up membership, or for voting against the party’s direction unless that is condoned within fifteen days, and under paragraph 6(1) the Speaker decides. Kihoto Hollohan (1992) held that the Speaker acts as a Tribunal and that finality does not exclude review under Articles 136, 226 and 227.

On 13 October the First Division Bench upheld the acceptance of six resignations and, as Verdictum reports, held that acceptance does not make the pending pleas ‘academic or infructuous’. It directed the Speaker to decide the pleas against four MLAs within two months.

The court did not disqualify anyone.

BIMSTEC was established in June 1997 by the Bangkok Declaration as BIST-EC, with Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand as founders. Myanmar joined in December 1997, and Bhutan and Nepal in 2004, giving the present seven members.

Its Secretariat was set up in Dhaka in 2014 after a decision at the Third Summit. The BIMSTEC Charter, signed at the Fifth Summit held virtually in Colombo in March 2022, entered into force in May 2024 once all members had ratified it.

After the 2021 reorganisation of sectors, India leads the Security sector: counter-terrorism and transnational crime, disaster management and energy. India hosted the first BIMSTEC Home Ministers’ Meeting in New Delhi, chaired by Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

The Fourth Summit, in 2018, had decided to convene meetings at this level. The Ministers adopted the Delhi Declaration, which sets out principles for security cooperation, and approved five instruments: one Convention, three Plans of Action and one MoU.

Note the verbs: the declaration was adopted and the instruments approved, and PIB gives no date for them to take effect.

WPI inflation rose to 11.39% (provisional) in September 2026 from 9.92% in August. Among the major groups, Fuel and Power stood at 25.85%, Manufactured Products at 9.76% and Primary Articles at 8.67%.

The index is compiled and released by the Office of the Economic Adviser in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. It is not a MoSPI index: the Consumer Price Index and the Consumer Food Price Index are MoSPI’s, and confusing the two compilers is a standard trap.

The series in use has base year 2022-23. Its weights show where the pressure points lie: Manufactured Products 63.13, Primary Articles 22.76 and Fuel and Power 14.11, so a broad rise in manufactured prices moves the headline more than a spike in a single primary commodity.

The WPI Food Index, with a weight of 24.99%, joins Food Articles from Primary Articles to Manufacture of Food Products from Manufactured Products. Remember also that the RBI’s inflation target is defined in terms of the CPI, not the WPI.

The Government has approved India’s accession to the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement (SIOFA). SIOFA was signed in Rome in July 2006 and has been in force since June 2012, with ten Contracting Parties and its headquarters at La Reunion.

It covers non-migratory stocks and excludes the highly migratory species listed in Annex I of UNCLOS. Tuna and tuna-like species are regulated by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), the other regional fisheries management organisation in these waters, which India joined by accepting its Agreement on 13 March 1995.

India has been a Cooperating Non-Contracting Party of SIOFA since 2022, with limited participation in decision-making, including in key bodies such as the Scientific Committee. On accession it would become a Contracting Party, and Indian-flagged fishing vessels and enterprises would be able to undertake authorised fishing of squids, toothfish, alfonsino and other non-migratory fish stocks within SIOFA’s jurisdiction.

Until the accession is completed, India remains a CNCP, and SIOFA’s own website still lists it as one.

The Hindu’s lead article on overtreatment and overmedication asks why Indian patients receive tests and medicines they do not need. Public health is a Directive under Article 47, and the main regulatory law is the Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Act, 2010, passed to register and regulate clinical establishments and to prescribe minimum standards of facilities and services.

It came into force in March 2012 in Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Sikkim and all Union Territories except Delhi, and other States adopt it under Article 252(1). Among the drivers the article lists is defensive medicine, even though the Supreme Court in Jacob Mathew v State of Punjab (2005) required a very high degree of negligence for criminal liability.

Abroad, the ABIM Foundation’s Choosing Wisely campaign began in 2012 with nine national specialty societies, which offered examples of tests or treatments commonly used in their fields that lacked strong supporting evidence. Choosing Wisely is not a WHO programme, and that is the trap in this question.

Regulation, professional guidance and patient awareness together are the editorial’s terrain.

The Hindu’s editorial on green crackers revisits a long judicial experiment. In Arjun Gopal v Union of India (2018) the Supreme Court allowed only reduced-emission and green crackers, banned joined crackers (laris) and barium salts, and barred online sale.

CSIR-NEERI developed the green cracker formulations, among them the safe water releaser (SWAS), safe minimal aluminium (SAFAL) and safe thermite cracker (STAR), each claimed to cut particulate emissions, and added a green logo and QR coding to curb counterfeit products. With the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organisation (PESO), the CPCB and the Environment Ministry, it set a definition of green crackers and baseline values for benchmarking them.

The point to carry into the exam is in the name: a green cracker is a reduced-emission cracker, not a pollution-free one, so Statement-I fails while Statement-II stands. In September 2026 the Court declined a total ban.

The editorial’s call for testing, coordination and awareness draws on Article 21, Article 48A and the fundamental duty in Article 51A(g).

The Hindu’s editorial on spiralling food prices sits on a clear legal frame. Under Section 45ZA of the RBI Act, 1934, ‘The Central Government shall, in consultation with the Bank, determine the inflation target in terms of the Consumer Price Index, once in every five years’.

The target is set by the Centre, then, not by the Monetary Policy Committee. It is 4% with a band of ±2%, and a Gazette notification renewed it for five more years, through March 2031.

The CPI, rebased from 2012=100 to 2024=100, is released by MoSPI; inflation was 5.54% (provisional) in September, the fourth month in a row above the 4% target, and the Consumer Food Price Index was 7.74%. The rates after the October 2026 policy: repo 5.50%, Standing Deposit Facility 5.25%, and Marginal Standing Facility and Bank Rate 5.75%.

So the MSF sits above the repo rate and the SDF below it. The editorial’s point is that inflation targeting works best when trade, supply-side and fiscal policies share the load.

In The Hindu, retired colonel Rajeev Agarwal argues that a run of US actions in 2026 shows American unilateralism straining India-US ties. One trigger is the US suspension of eight employers from the PERM green-card process.

PERM is a labour certification step towards an employer-sponsored green card, after which the employer files Form I-140 with USCIS; the H-1B is a separate, temporary work visa. As reported, the action names eight employers, four of them not Indian, and India’s Ministry of External Affairs was reported as saying it does not by itself affect existing H-1B visas.

On trade, an additional 10% ad valorem duty under Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974 has applied to Indian goods since July 2026, and a February 2026 framework for an interim trade agreement has not ended the friction. On defence, the framework for the US-India Major Defence Partnership was signed in October 2025 and runs ten years.

Technology initiatives such as iCET and TRUST raised hopes, but the challenge, the column says, is translating declarations into measurable outcomes.

The Hindu’s Data Point on legal aid for undertrials brings together three things the syllabus keeps apart: a Directive Principle (Article 39A), a Fundamental Right (Article 22(1)) and the economics of keeping poor people in jail before trial. Article 39A, ‘Equal justice and free legal aid’, was inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, with effect from January 1977.

It directs the State to provide free legal aid so that opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities. Article 22(1) sits in Part III, the Fundamental Rights: a person who is arrested must be informed of the grounds of arrest and cannot be denied the right to consult, and be defended by, a legal practitioner of his choice.

Undertrial figures of this kind are usually drawn from Prison Statistics India, which is published by the National Crime Records Bureau, not by the Bureau of Police Research and Development. In an answer on undertrials, cite all three: the Directive, the right and the data.

C. Raja Mohan’s column in The Indian Express reads a thaw between the US and Russia as ‘the other G2’. The trigger was a Trump-Putin telephone call earlier this month, after which the US Treasury’s OFAC issued General License 135, authorising transactions in Russian-origin diesel until April 2027.

Read it precisely: the licence covers sale, delivery and offloading as well as imports, and it is a time-limited licence, not a lifting of sanctions. History also counsels caution.

After the Crimea crisis, the Hague Declaration of G7 leaders said: ‘We will suspend our participation in the G-8 until Russia changes course’. Russia was not expelled, and a column’s shorthand that the G8 ‘suspended Russia’ should be written in an answer as the G7 suspending its participation.

Trump has long sought better ties with Moscow: he pressed for Russia’s return to the G8 in his first term and held a joint press conference with Putin at Helsinki in July 2018. For a Prelims answer, the institution that issues a licence and the legal effect of that licence are the two things to get right.

The Indian Express editorial on the work of peace in Manipur asks for sustained dialogue with community bodies, use of the Hill Areas Committee under Article 371C to give hill-area legislators a voice, and relief for the displaced alongside security operations. The constitutional terms matter.

Under Article 356, the President may act ‘on receipt of a report from the Governor of a State or otherwise’ if satisfied that the State’s government cannot be carried on in accordance with the Constitution. In Manipur, President’s Rule was imposed in February 2025 after the Chief Minister resigned and was revoked in February 2026.

Throughout, the Assembly was in suspended animation: not dissolved, keeping its term but unable to act while President’s Rule lasted. Article 371C is a special provision for Manipur: the President may provide for a committee of the Legislative Assembly made up of members elected from the Hill Areas, and the Governor reports to the President on the administration of the Hill Areas annually, or whenever so required.

It was inserted by the Constitution (Twenty-seventh Amendment) Act, 1971, with effect from February 1972.

Purvi Mehta’s column in The Indian Express asks where India’s CSR money goes. The mandate is Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013, which took effect in April 2014 and requires companies above set thresholds to spend a share of their profits on CSR.

Schedule VII lists the activities that count as CSR, such as education, health and environment. Spending follows that list unevenly.

CSR spending stood at Rs 34,908.75 crore in 2023-24, and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ sector table in a Lok Sabha answer puts education (Rs 12,134.57 crore) and health care (Rs 7,150.81 crore) well ahead of environmental sustainability, rural development projects and livelihood enhancement projects. The column’s first concern is geographic concentration.

The pairing in this question tests a distinction examiners like: Section 135 creates the obligation, while Schedule VII defines what qualifies. Both statements are true, but knowing what qualifies does not explain why a company must spend.

In a Mains answer, cite the section for the duty and the schedule for the scope.

The Siang Valley is in the news over protests against a proposed 11,200 MW hydropower project in the region. Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu agreed in principle to reduce the number of security personnel deployed in the valley and to withdraw FIRs registered during the protests, PTI reported in The Hindu.

He agreed after a meeting with the Adi Baane Kebang Youth Wing and the Adi Students’ Union, describing the steps as ‘confidence-building measures to facilitate dialogue’. The step is in principle, not yet a withdrawal, and the wider disagreement remains unresolved.

For the map, fix the river’s names: it rises in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo and enters Arunachal Pradesh as the Siang. Questions on trans-boundary rivers often turn on exactly this change of name at the border, so learn each river as a pair of names, one on each side.

In a Mains answer on large dams in the eastern Himalaya, the same river appears in debates on water security and on the rights of the communities who live along it.