Current Affairs Quiz 18 October 2026

The Supreme Court’s order, dated 15 October 2026 and made public on 17 October, settles a question that Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020) had left open. Bhasin held that freedom of speech and of trade ‘through the medium of the internet is constitutionally protected’ under Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(g), but the Court ‘refrained from expressing any view on whether the right to access the internet is, by itself, a fundamental right’.

The new order says the issue ‘is no longer res-integra’, that is, no longer an open question. It holds that the right to access and use the internet is a fundamental right of every individual under Article 21 read with Article 19(1)(a), and that children enjoy the same rights irrespective of their age.

Its line of authority includes Secretary, Ministry of I&B v. Cricket Association of Bengal (1995), which read the right to receive information into Article 19(1)(a). On regulation, the bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K.V. Chandran said blanket restrictions on children’s access are ‘nothing more than unproven measures of proven disproportionality’, and directed the Union to create a National Hash & URL List Database to detect and remove child sexual exploitation and abuse material.

The internet order sets out the laws that already protect children online. Section 79 of the IT Act, 2000 is the safe harbour: an intermediary is not liable for third-party information, data or communication links it makes available or hosts, subject to conditions.

Under the present law, the Court noted, losing that safe harbour is the only consequence for an intermediary that fails, and one section of the order is headed ‘Need to rethink and move beyond Section 79 of the IT Act.’ Section 67B of the IT Act and Section 15 of the POCSO Act are named by the Court among the penal provisions ‘designed for the protection of children within the cyberspace’. Section 67B carries up to five years and a fine up to Rs 10 lakh on first conviction, and up to seven years on a second or later one; for it, ‘children’ means persons who have not completed 18 years.

Sections 19 and 21 of the POCSO Act require anyone who knows of an offence to report it to the Special Juvenile Police Unit or the local police, on pain of up to six months’ imprisonment or fine or both.

The Graham Act, signed on 18 September 2026, provides for three sets of duties. Goods from Russia face an extra 500 percent ad valorem duty.

Goods from the largest five importers of crude oil and natural gas that originated in Russia face an extra 100 percent, but only if the country knowingly makes new purchases on or after 18 October 2026. Goods from the top five facilitators of Russian oil sanctions evasion also face an extra 100 percent.

The second and third are secondary tariffs: they fall on a third country’s goods because of its dealings with a sanctioned country. An executive order dated 16 October 2026 used Section 115(a) of the Act to waive the duties provided for in Sections 112 and 113 and in the order itself, recording for each waiver that a certification and report had gone to Congress, as Section 115(b) requires.

The waiver is not a repeal: it lasts until Washington decides that ‘further action is appropriate’. For India, one of the top buyers of Russian oil, a duty tied to its energy purchases makes market access to the US depend on whom it buys oil from, which tests its strategic autonomy.

Parental consent is, a column in The Indian Express says, the one remedy all sides back after the Supreme Court’s internet order, and the column argues that it would make children’s right conditional. The Act already provides for it for data processing, though Section 9 comes into force only in 2027, eighteen months after the Rules were notified.

Section 9(1) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 says a Data Fiduciary shall, before processing any personal data of a child or of a person with disability who has a lawful guardian, obtain verifiable consent of the parent or the lawful guardian, in the manner prescribed. Section 2(f) defines a child as an individual who has not completed the age of eighteen years.

Section 9(3) bars tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at children. Rule 10 of the DPDP Rules 2025, notified in November 2025, prescribes the manner: the platform must check that the person consenting as a parent is an adult, using reliable details of identity and age.

The Rules give eighteen months for phased compliance, so Rule 10 applies from 2027. The column’s alternative is a set of duties on platforms, such as accounts private by default and no contact from unknown adults, with an age check that returns ‘one bit, over or under’.

The OCI scheme lets eligible foreign nationals of Indian origin register as Overseas Citizens of India, but, as The Hindu’s explainer puts it, OCI does not confer Indian citizenship; in law, an OCI cardholder remains a foreigner. The scheme sits in Sections 7A to 7D of the Citizenship Act, 1955, inserted by Act 6 of 2004 with effect from 3 December 2004 and substituted by Act 1 of 2015 with effect from 6 January 2015.

Section 7A sets eligibility by past Indian citizenship, eligibility for it at the commencement of the Constitution, origin in a territory that became part of India after 15 August 1947, or descent from such a person. It bars anyone who, or whose parent, grandparent or great-grandparent, is or had been a citizen of Pakistan or Bangladesh.

The privileges come from a notification under Section 7B(1), S.O. 1050(E) of 4 March 2021: a lifelong visa, exemption from FRRO registration, and parity with NRIs in the purchase of immovable property other than agricultural land, and in tests such as NEET and JEE, but only against an NRI or supernumerary seat. Section 7B(2) lists what the card withholds, including appointment as a High Court judge under Article 217 and appointment to public services.

The notice telling actor Imran Khan, a US citizen with an OCI card, to leave India by 28 October turns on a basic line in the fundamental rights. Some fundamental rights belong to citizens only, others to every person.

Article 19(1) opens ‘All citizens shall have the right’, so its freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly are for citizens. When The Hindu’s explainer says OCI cardholders ‘cannot claim these fundamental rights’, it means the Article 19 freedoms.

Article 21 reads ‘No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law’, so it protects every person, citizen or not. The Calcutta High Court placed political views and political activity inside Article 21 for a foreigner.

Two separate powers are in play: a direction to leave India, and the cancellation of the OCI card under Section 7D of the Citizenship Act, 1955. The question for any court is how far the Article 21 reasoning reaches against the State’s power over foreigners.

An open-weight AI model is one whose trained parameters, or weights, anyone can download, run and adapt. In October 2026, Reflection AI released Beam, Meta released Muse Spark Open and NVIDIA released two Nemotron 3.5 models, with a third scheduled for 23 October, while Mistral AI announced Timestral.

Open-weight is a narrower promise than open source. The Open Source Initiative’s Open Source AI Definition 1.0 grants the freedoms to use, study, modify and share, and its preferred form for modifying a system includes data information, the code used to train it and the parameters.

Without the training code and data information, a user can run and adapt a model but cannot build a substantially equivalent system. Licences narrow the promise further: Meta’s Muse Model License carries limited commercial terms, while Apache 2.0 and MIT are permissive.

Open-weight AI is not new either: GPT-2’s weights came out in 2019. What has changed, The Hindu’s explainer says, is the level of capability available through downloadable models and the rise of Chinese developers such as DeepSeek.

Companies release weights to build ecosystems and to raise demand for computing infrastructure.

The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), under the Department of Pharmaceuticals in the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers, has undertaken Trade Margin Rationalisation of 137 identified non-scheduled anti-cancer drugs. The trade margin is capped at 30% of the MRP, in accordance with Paragraph 19 of the Drugs (Prices Control) Order (DPCO), 2013, and the Gazette notification is dated 17 October 2026.

The list was recommended by an Expert Committee under the Directorate General of Health Services and would be updated periodically; it includes Pembrolizumab, Durvalumab and Osimertinib. Manufacturers must inform the NPPA of the revised prices within 7 days of the notification’s publication, and the revised prices will take effect on 9 November 2026.

MRPs are expected to come down by up to 70%, depending on existing price structures. Retailers and hospitals must charge and display the reduced prices, and consumers can check them on the Pharma Sahi Daam app.

Manufacturers must also maintain current production and supply levels. The precedent is the 2019 pilot, which capped trade margins for 42 anti-cancer drugs at 30%; PIB says the MRP of 526 brands was then reduced by up to 90%.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has published a draft amendment to the Food Safety and Standards (Foods for Infant Nutrition) Regulations, 2020, proposing to prohibit the addition of sucrose and fructose in food products for infants up to six months of age. The draft, the Food Safety and Standards (Foods for Infant Nutrition) Amendment Regulations, 2026, was published in the Gazette of India on 16 October 2026.

Its proposed text reads: ‘sucrose and fructose shall not be added in the products intended for infants up to the age of 6 months’. The 2020 Regulations cover products from birth up to 24 months of age.

Under them, lactose and glucose polymers are the preferred sources of carbohydrates, while sucrose and/or fructose may be added only when required as a carbohydrate source, subject to prescribed limits. The aim is to minimise infants’ exposure to added sugars, and PIB presents the proposal as complementing exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months of life.

Objections and suggestions may be sent within 60 days of the Gazette being made available to the public, and they will be considered by FSSAI before finalisation.

FSSAI’s draft Food Safety and Standards (Contaminants, Toxins and Residues) Amendment Regulations, 2026, published in the Gazette of India on 16 October 2026, propose Maximum Residue Limits (MRLs) of 20 mg/kg (20 ppm) for acetamiprid and 50 mg/kg (50 ppm) for imidacloprid in tea, subject to finalisation of the draft regulations. MRLs specify the maximum legally permitted concentration of pesticide residues in food commodities and are set on the basis of scientific assessments; in the release’s words, they provide a measurable regulatory basis for monitoring pesticide residues.

The benchmarks matter for Prelims: the proposed acetamiprid limit is lower than the corresponding limits of 30 ppm in Japan and 50 ppm in the United States, while the imidacloprid limit has been formulated with reference to international Codex standards. The release also recalls earlier steps: a review of MRLs under the 2024 amendment to the same regulations, and the delisting of 13 pesticides identified as having higher toxicity.

It puts India’s average pesticide use at less than 0.5 kg per hectare, against an estimated global average of 2.38 kg per hectare. Until the draft is finalised, the proposed limits do not bind.

In K. Ramalingam and Others v. Government of Tamil Nadu (2026 INSC 1144), decided on 16 October 2026 by Justices Pamidighantam Sri Narasimha and Alok Aradhe, the Supreme Court held that the transfer of land belonging to the Nagapalayam Mariamman-Ponnachiamman Temple in Tamil Nadu’s Erode district to the State government, for the construction of a Taluk Office, was illegal. A temporary trustee had executed a gift deed in August 2017 transferring the land to the State.

The land was inam property granted for the support and maintenance of the deity, so Section 41 of the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, 1959 prohibited its transfer by gift; one report calls the gift void ab initio under Section 41(1). The principle is that the State is a custodian and regulator of temple property, not its owner.

The Taluk Office was not removed; the rent was raised from Rs 13,235 to Rs 31,000, payable retrospectively from 8 March 2019 and to be revised every three years, with arrears within three months and costs of Rs 1 lakh to the temple within eight weeks. The Court set aside the Madras High Court judgment that had dismissed the writ petition.

In Rajkumar Madki v. Dr. Shailendra Beldal (2026 INSC 1138), decided on 16 October 2026, a bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu held that private citizens can file criminal complaints against elected candidates for furnishing false information or concealing material facts in election affidavits under the Representation of the People Act. The case was an appeal against a Karnataka High Court judgment that had quashed Madki’s complaint against Shailendra Beldale, MLA from Bidar.

The complaint, filed under Section 200 of the CrPC before the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Bengaluru, alleged a false residential address in his 2023 Assembly nomination affidavit. The High Court had held that such a complaint must pass the test of Section 195 CrPC.

The Supreme Court disagreed: Section 125A is not named in Section 195, and the omission must be treated as deliberate. There is a twist that suits a Prelims trap.

Despite settling the legal question in favour of private complaints, the Court declined to revive the proceedings against Beldale, so the complaint in this case stays quashed. The law point and the outcome went different ways.

The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) has disbursed Rs 1.19 crore under the Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) mechanism to 29 State Biodiversity Boards and one Union Territory Biodiversity Council, as PIB announced on 17 October 2026. The money came from ABS contributions received from companies for research and commercial utilisation of agricultural biological resources, including maize, rice, pearl millet and cotton.

Because the resources were procured through markets or traders, individual benefit claimers could not be readily identified, so allocations were made in proportion to the estimated cultivation area of each crop, using the Unified Portal for Agricultural Statistics. Maharashtra received the most, followed by Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana.

The money is to be used exclusively for activities specified under Section 32(2) of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, such as documentation, conservation and sustainable use, local biodiversity governance, research, capacity building and community livelihoods. By PIB’s account, the NBA has disbursed Rs 86 crore realised from the agriculture sector and more than Rs 203 crore overall.

COP 17 of the Convention on Biological Diversity is scheduled for 19 to 30 October 2026 in Yerevan, Armenia.

An Explained piece in The Indian Express on 18 October 2026 reports that the Staff Selection Commission (SSC) has been using a question-bank system called ‘Q Vault’ for the past five years and, according to senior SSC officials, has kept a record of zero paper leaks over this period. That record is the Commission’s own claim, not an independent audit.

The officials describe four parts: a large question bank, a large pool of questions, the elimination of printed question papers and the generation of question papers minutes before the examination. The bank holds between one lakh and two lakh questions.

The paper is assembled from the vault and encrypted shortly before the exam, sent to about 200 centres and opened when candidates log in. The SSC holds computer-based tests for about a dozen recruitment examinations a year, across more than 200 centres in around 140 cities, in over 300 shifts.

The SSC falls under the Department of Personnel and Training. PRS’s summary of the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Bill, 2024 listed the SSC among the authorities it covers, and IE notes that the task force headed by Nandan Nilekani suggested a question bank.

The IndiaAI Mission was launched in March 2024 with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore. Its plan included AI compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more Graphics Processing Units, and an IndiaAI Innovation Centre to develop indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models.

By the Government’s account of 13 March 2026, 12 teams had been shortlisted in phase 1 to develop indigenous foundational models, and more than 38,000 GPUs had been empanelled through 14 AI service providers, with 20,000 more then being added. The Hindu’s explainer on open-weight AI sets this beside a global trend: in October 2026 alone, Reflection AI, Meta, NVIDIA and Mistral AI put out models whose trained parameters anyone can download, run and adapt.

Open-weight is a narrower promise than open source: without the training code and information about the training data, a user can run and adapt a model but cannot build a substantially equivalent system. Licences differ too, from permissive ones such as Apache 2.0 and MIT to Meta’s licence with limited commercial terms.

For Prelims, keep the original GPU plan and the later empanelled figure apart.