Current Affairs Quiz 20 October 2026

China’s export-control framework covers dual-use items, which its 2024 Regulations on Export Control of Dual-Use Items define as goods, technologies and services usable for civil or military purposes. It rests on the Export Control Law, adopted on 17 October 2020 and in force from 1 December 2020, and on the Dual-Use Regulations, in force from 1 December 2024.

Announcement No. 50 of 2026, issued by MOFCOM and the General Administration of Customs on 19 October 2026 and in force from 18 November 2026, lists full-face tunnel-boring machines (shield and hard-rock types), their key parts and remanufacturing technology, along with walking excavators and high-altitude wet-spraying machines for use above 3,000 m. It uses two routes: a licence for ‘sensitive countries and regions’ that have disputes with China, and registration with end-use undertakings for all other destinations. Foreign parties also need a licence to re-export these items to the sensitive destinations.

The same day, Announcement No. 49 covered drones and No. 51 dredger items. India uses TBMs for metro rail, railway corridors and tunnelling, including in border areas, and depends on imports for them; separately, a 16 October plan on more than 40 technologies remains a draft.

JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) is planned as a round trip of about five years to the Martian system. About one year after launch it is to arrive near Mars and enter a Quasi-Satellite Orbit, which flies close to Phobos for detailed observation.

The rover IDEFIX (25 kg) will land first; the main spacecraft will then land and collect at least 10 g with two samplers, a corer that takes cores from a depth of two centimetres and a pneumatic sampler that uses pressurised gas. Deimos is observed only during a flyby.

The Sample Return Capsule, about 60 cm in diameter, is to land in Australia in Japanese fiscal year 2031, and the samples go to ISAS at Sagamihara. The science question is how the moons formed: from debris after a giant impact on Mars, or as asteroids captured by Mars’s gravity.

The partners are NASA, CNES, DLR and ESA. India’s Chandrayaan-4, approved by the Union Cabinet on 18 September 2024 at Rs 2,104.06 crore with two LVM3 launches, is a Moon sample-return mission, not a Mars mission.

Two kinds of time meet in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Atomic clocks give International Atomic Time (TAI); the Earth’s slightly irregular rotation gives UT1.

UTC, produced by the BIPM, runs at TAI’s rate but differs from TAI by a whole number of seconds. From 1 January 1972, leap seconds kept UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1, and the IERS decided them about six months ahead.

TAI-UTC rose from 10 seconds in 1972 to 37 seconds from 1 January 2017, so 27 leap seconds were inserted and none was removed. Resolution 5 of the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), adopted at Versailles on 15 October 2026, decides that continuous UTC will become effective on 20 May 2027 and that |UT1-UTC| may reach at most 3,600 seconds.

Its reasons: transport, energy, telecom and space projects need UTC without adjustment; a CCTF-IERS workshop put the probability of a negative leap second at 30 per cent by 2035; and service providers’ differing fixes cause inconsistency between systems. In India, CSIR-NPL keeps Indian Standard Time traceable to UTC within a few nanoseconds, so the change reaches every system synchronised to IST.

The Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act has three provisions an aspirant must keep apart. Section 7 punishes public servants who accept, obtain or attempt to obtain an undue advantage to improperly or dishonestly perform a public duty.

Section 17A, inserted in 2018, requires prior approval before a probe into an offence relatable to a recommendation made or decision taken by a public servant in the discharge of official functions or duties; its proviso exempts the arrest of a person on the spot while accepting or attempting to accept an undue advantage. Section 19 deals with sanction for prosecution.

On 16 October 2026, the Supreme Court held that Section 17A did not cover Tejaram, a Rajasthan police constable posted at Sirohi who was accused of demanding Rs 1.5 lakh, because the alleged demand was not linked to any decision or recommendation in his official duties. The validity of Section 17A is a separate question: in January 2026, Justice Nagarathna struck the section down while Justice K.V. Viswanathan upheld it by reading it narrowly, and the matter was placed before the Chief Justice of India for a larger Bench, Bar & Bench reported.

A ryotwari patta, in The Hindu’s description, is an official revenue document and land record issued to an individual cultivator (ryot), certifying their right to occupy and cultivate a specific piece of land while paying land tax directly to the government. Government land such as a tank, recorded as poramboke, stands apart from ryoti land that is eligible for a patta.

In the case decided on 16 October 2026, the 1911 resettlement register recorded land at Thirumullaivoyal village in Tiruvallur district as ‘Government Poramboke’. The District Revenue Officer, Tiruvallur, granted a patta for 0.72 acres in January 2011, and 20 flats were later built on the land.

The Commissioner of Land Administration set the patta aside in December 2019, and the Madras High Court upheld the cancellation and directed restoration of the water body. A Bench of Justices S.V.N. Bhatti and N.V. Anjaria, with Justice Bhatti writing, dismissed three civil appeals.

It directed the Chief Secretary and the District Collector to allot them a vacant, commensurate site, preferably within six months, and then demolish 0.22 acres of construction, without breaching Section 14-A of the Tamil Nadu Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Act, 1948.

India has two monsoon seasons. The southwest monsoon is active from June to September and drives the kharif crop cycle.

The northeast monsoon affects parts of the country from October to December; it is less intense, but significant for rabi crops. In 2026, the IMD said the southwest monsoon withdrew from the entire country on 15 October, and northeast monsoon rainfall activity commenced the same day over Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Karaikal, Coastal Andhra Pradesh, Rayalaseema, South Interior Karnataka, and Kerala and Mahe.

It forecast a wet spell with isolated heavy falls over south peninsular India. The Hindu, citing the IMD, reported a season total of 759.4 mm, 12.6% below the normal of 868.6 mm, and named El Niño conditions, which emerged in June, as a key reason.

El Niño is one of the three phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It leads to less monsoon rainfall in India and has a warming effect on the planet; its opposite phase, La Niña, usually results in cooling, and ENSO also has a neutral phase.

The Port of Colombo lies along key shipping routes, and both Chinese and Indian companies hold terminals there. China Merchants Port Holdings holds 85% of the Colombo International Container Terminal (CICT), and Adani International Port Holdings holds 51% of the adjoining Colombo West International Terminal (CWIT).

China Merchants is also involved in managing the southern Hambantota Port. In 2023, China Merchants announced a $392 million joint venture for the South Asia Commercial and Logistics Hub (SACLH), with 70% for itself and 15% each for the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) and Access Engineering PLC, on a Build-Operate-Transfer model.

It was touted as the first major foreign direct investment to enter Sri Lanka after the country’s 2022 debt default. On 17 May 2026, The Sunday Morning reported that the project had been cancelled.

China Merchants’ filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on 15 October 2026 and the SLPA’s statement of 19 October formally confirmed the exit. The Hindu called it the second big exit from an agreed project in Sri Lanka, after Adani Green withdrew from a $442-million renewable energy project in northern Sri Lanka in February 2025.

The upgraded Agri Welfare Portal, launched on 19 October 2026 by Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare and Rural Development Shivraj Singh Chouhan, aims to give farmers direct, easy access to government schemes, financial assistance and agricultural information on their mobile phones. It acts as a single window to PM-KISAN, AgriStack and the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana.

Its design follows two standards of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY): the Digital Brand Identity Manual 3.0 and the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites 3.0. Online eligibility checks, direct applications and Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) are meant to reduce the role of intermediaries.

The portal is lightweight enough for basic smartphones and areas with weak connectivity, carries information on weather, scientific farming practices, the availability of seeds and fertilisers, and market prices, and supports screen readers and simple navigation for persons with disabilities. It also brings together Farmer Producer Organisations, Primary Agricultural Credit Societies, agricultural scientists, researchers and startups, and a special training campaign will be conducted through Krishi Vigyan Kendras across the country.

Place-based questions reward reading the map behind each story. A baby orangutan of Sumatran origin, rescued in India in 2024, was repatriated from Gujarat and arrived at Kualanamu International Airport in Medan, Indonesia, on 19 October 2026.

The CITES Management Authorities of India and Indonesia coordinated its return, and officials of the Consulate General of India attended a reception organised by Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry. Five young orangutans rescued in Odisha in September are being cared for at Nandankanan Zoological Park in Bhubaneswar while their species and origin are confirmed; their repatriation is not yet done.

In space, JAXA launched its MMX mission to Phobos on H3 flight No. 10 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. Japan’s earlier sample-return mission, Hayabusa2, returned its capsule from the asteroid Ryugu to the Woomera Prohibited Area in Australia in December 2020.

MMX’s Sample Return Capsule is also planned to land in Australia, in Japanese fiscal year 2031, with the samples going to JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at Sagamihara, near Tokyo.

A sample-return mission must reach and land on a body, collect material and bring it safely back to Earth for analysis. India’s Chandrayaan-4, approved by the Union Cabinet on 18 September 2024, is designed to do this on the Moon: in the words of the PIB release, ‘to develop and demonstrate the technologies to come back to Earth after successfully landing on the Moon and also collect moon samples and analyse them on Earth’.

It needs two LVM3 launch missions, at a total cost of Rs 2,104.06 crore, and the release said it was ‘expected to be completed within 36 months of approval’. Its heritage is Chandrayaan-3’s soft landing on the Moon.

The release placed the mission within a wider vision: a Bharatiya Antariksh Station by 2035 and an Indian landing on the Moon by 2040. Japan’s MMX, launched on 20 October 2026 from the Tanegashima Space Center, shows how long that chain can be at a greater distance: a long cruise, close-orbit operations, two landings, a capsule built to survive re-entry and a laboratory to receive the sample.