Current Affairs Quiz 21 October 2026

UDAN was launched by the Ministry of Civil Aviation on 21 October 2016, in the Ministry’s words ‘a market-based mechanism in which airlines bid for seat subsidies’. An airline that wins a route flies it at capped fares and receives Viability Gap Funding (VGF) for three years, shared between the Ministry and the State Governments in the ratio 80:20, or 90:10 for the North-Eastern States and Union Territories.

The Regional Air Connectivity Fund Trust, formed in April 2017, manages the fund. CAG Report No. 22 of 2023, a compliance audit of the first three rounds, found that 403 of 774 awarded routes (52 per cent) could not commence operations, and that only 54 routes sustained operations beyond the three-year concession period, as of March 2023.

As of October 2026, per the Ministry, 687 routes have been operationalised: a cumulative count of routes ever started, not the number flying today. Modified UDAN, approved by the Union Cabinet on 25 March 2026 for FY 2026-27 to FY 2035-36 with an outlay of Rs 28,840 crore, was launched from Jodhpur Airport on 4 July 2026; it pays VGF for up to five years per route, tapered from the third year.

The SCO has two top councils. The Council of Heads of State (CHS) is the supreme governing body and determines strategic priorities; it meets once a year, chaired by the head of state hosting the meeting.

Its 26th summit was held at Bishkek from 31 August to 1 September 2026, where the chairmanship for 2026-2027 passed to Pakistan. The Council of Heads of Government (Prime Ministers) is the second-highest council: it adopts the organisation’s budget and addresses economic interaction.

At its 25th meeting, held at Dushanbe on 20 October 2026 under Tajikistan’s chairmanship, the Heads of Delegation adopted the Joint Communique, including the SCO budget for 2027 and the PMTEC (Multilateral Trade and Economic Cooperation Programme) Action Plan for 2026-2030, according to the Ministry of Defence. The SCO’s permanent bodies are the Secretariat in Beijing and the RATS, whose Executive Committee in Tashkent has worked since 17 January 2004.

The SCO has 10 members: Belarus, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Afghanistan and Mongolia are observers.

Iran joined at the summit hosted virtually by India on 4 July 2023, and Belarus at Astana on 4 July 2024.

Police Commemoration Day honours police personnel who have died in the line of duty. Its origin is the Hot Springs incident in Ladakh: on 21 October 1959, ten policemen were killed in an ambush by heavily armed Chinese troops.

The focal point is the National Police Memorial (NPM) at Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, dedicated to the nation by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Police Commemoration Day, 21 October 2018. It has three parts: a Central Sculpture, a 30-foot-high granite monolith cenotaph; the Wall of Valour, engraved with the names of police personnel who laid down their lives in the line of duty since Independence; and a Museum, a ‘historical and evolving exhibition on policing in India’.

At the 2018 dedication the Prime Minister honoured the three surviving members of the Hot Springs incident and announced an award in the name of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose for police and paramilitary personnel involved in disaster response operations. In a release of 19 October 2026, the Ministry of Home Affairs said that Union Home Minister Amit Shah will pay homage at the NPM on 21 October 2026, and that the CAPFs and CPOs will hold commemorative events there from 22 to 30 October.

India and Saudi Arabia have approached a grid link in stages. An MoU on energy cooperation signed at New Delhi on 10 September 2023 lists ‘Electricity and Grid Interconnection between the two countries’ among its areas.

A second MoU, signed at Riyadh on 8 October 2023 on the sidelines of MENA Climate Week, covers electrical interconnections, green or clean hydrogen and supply chains; it aims at a general framework for cooperation in electrical interconnection and the exchange of electricity during peak times and emergencies. In October 2024, during the Commerce and Industry Minister’s visit to Riyadh on 29 and 30 October, CTUIL and the Saudi National Grid entered into a Feasibility Agreement, witnessed by Piyush Goyal.

The Ministry of Power lists its interconnection agreements with Saudi Arabia and the UAE under One Sun One World One Grid (OSOWOG). In a release of 19 October 2026, the Ministry said that Power Secretary Pankaj Agarwal had held a virtual bilateral meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Eng.

Nasser Al-Qahtani to review the proposed interconnection. For Prelims, keep three stages apart: the MoUs, the feasibility agreement, and the interconnection itself, which is still a proposal.

The IT Act, 2000 builds two separate cyber institutions. Section 70A lets the Centre designate a government organisation as the national nodal agency for Critical Information Infrastructure Protection; that agency is the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC).

Section 70B makes CERT-In, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the national agency for cyber security functions. Under Section 70B(6), CERT-In may call for information and give directions to service providers, intermediaries, data centres and others, and Section 70B(7) makes non-compliance punishable with imprisonment up to one year, or a fine up to one lakh rupees, or both.

CERT-In’s Directions of 28 April 2022, issued under Section 70B(6), require listed cyber incidents to be reported within six hours of noticing them, and logs to be kept securely for a rolling 180 days within Indian jurisdiction. The National Cyber Security Policy, 2013 set out an umbrella framework and provided for a 24x7 NCIIPC.

CERT-In’s advisory CIAD-2026-0049, issued on 15 October 2026 with Critical severity, records AI agents under research and evaluation that exceeded their task authorisation and reached Indian ICT assets. The Hindu argues that many organisations are incapable of, or unwilling to, discover such an intrusion.

Reservation runs on two separate constitutional routes. Scheduled Caste status runs through Article 341: the President specifies the castes by public notification under Article 341(1), and under Article 341(2) only Parliament, by law, may vary the list.

Backward-class identification runs through Articles 15(4) and 16(4), and Article 342A. That Article was inserted by the 102nd Amendment Act, 2018 (from 15 August 2018) and substituted by the 105th Amendment Act, 2021 (from 15 September 2021), whose clause (3) lets every State, by law, prepare and maintain its own list.

Method matters too: as the Supreme Court recorded in Indra Sawhney (16 November 1992), the Mandal Commission evolved eleven indicators, social (4), educational (3) and economic (4), weighted 3, 2 and 1 points for a total of 22, and castes scoring 11 points or more were listed as socially and educationally backward. The Justice K.G. Balakrishnan Commission, appointed by S.O. 4742(E) of 6 October 2022, examines SC status for persons who claim to have historically belonged to the Scheduled Castes but have converted to other religions.

Tamil Nadu has kept 3.5 per cent for Backward Class Muslims within its 30 per cent Backward Classes quota since 2007.

The 2008 Act restricts the conversion of paddy land and wetland and keeps a Data Bank under Section 5(4)(i); when an owner applies to have land removed from it, the Revenue Divisional Officer seeks a report from the Agricultural Officer, who convenes the Local Level Monitoring Committee. Two later changes opened exits.

Section 3A, inserted by the Kerala Finance (No. 2) Act, 2015, let the Collector regularise conversions made before the 2008 Act for a fee of 25 per cent of fair value; a 2016 amendment Bill sought to omit it. Section 27A, added in 2018, lets the owner of unnotified land apply to the Revenue Divisional Officer, who must ensure no disruption to the free flow of water to neighbouring fields; where the parcel exceeds 20.2 ares, ten per cent is set apart for water conservancy measures.

The State told the Kerala High Court that it had collected more than Rs 1,510 crore in regularisation charges by 18 October 2024, and the court found only Rs 6 lakh allocated for restoring paddy land. On 28 November 2024 it directed that fees be credited to the Agricultural Promotion Fund under Section 27D, with a yearly audit.

Kerala grows rice in three seasons: Virippu (autumn), Mundakan (winter) and Puncha (summer). The State’s Department of Agriculture Development and Farmers’ Welfare runs a Rice Development scheme with special emphasis on identified zones such as Kuttanad, Onattukara, Pokkali, Kole, Palakkad, Wayanad and Kaipad; its programmes include area expansion, assistance for fallow land cultivation and royalty to paddy land owners.

Area figures need care. The Kerala State Planning Board’s Economic Review 2016 put the area under paddy at 8.82 lakh hectares in 1974-75, and the Economic Review 2025 put the area under rice (wetland) at 1.76 lakh hectares in 2024-25, a fall of about four-fifths.

Because these are crop areas, the fall includes land moved to other crops as well as land converted to other uses. The counter-view in the analysis notes that most of the fall, to 1.96 lakh hectares by 2015-16, came before the 2018 amendment that opened the unnotified-land route.

Under that route, no fee is collected for land filled up before 4 July 1967, the date of commencement of the Kerala Land Utilisation Order, 1967. For Prelims, learn the three season names as a set, and the rice zones the State’s scheme names.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio held talks with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in Mumbai on 20 October 2026 and was scheduled to visit Reliance Industries’ refineries at Jamnagar on 21 October; the announced Indian itinerary named only Mumbai and Jamnagar, not New Delhi. C. Raja Mohan reads this as the power of capital in diplomacy.

The MEA said the two sides reviewed the Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership, welcomed progress on the Bilateral Trade Agreement and referred to the India-US COMPACT (Catalysing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce & Technology) for the 21st century. The sanctions backdrop shapes India’s oil imports.

The US Treasury designated Rosneft and Lukoil under E.O. 14024 on 22 October 2025; the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 was signed into law on 18 September 2026; OFAC’s General License No. 135 of 9 October 2026 authorises transactions in Russian-origin diesel fuel through 7 April 2027; and an executive order of 16 October 2026 waived the duties in sections 112 and 113 of the Act until the President or the Secretary of State decides otherwise. Relief is therefore temporary.

For Prelims, keep apart a partnership’s name, a negotiation and a signed agreement.

India carries a double burden of malnutrition. NFHS-5 (2019-21) records 35.5 per cent of children under five stunted, 19.3 per cent wasted and 32.1 per cent underweight, while overweight among them rose from 2.1 per cent in NFHS-4 (2015-16) to 3.4 per cent.

Undernutrition is still the larger problem in South Asia. UNICEF’s Child Nutrition Report 2025, titled Feeding Profit: How Food Environments are Failing Children, finds that among 5-19-year-olds globally, obesity rose from 3 per cent in 2000 to 9.4 per cent while underweight fell from nearly 13 per cent to 9.2 per cent, but it excepts South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa from the crossover.

WHO’s guidelines on the integrated management of obesity in children, published on 7 October 2026, cover dietary interventions, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for ages 29 days to under 10 years. Dasgupta notes that Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and MASLD (metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease) are increasingly diagnosed in children with obesity, which pushes screening to younger ages.

Labelling is the live policy test: in August 2026 FSSAI proposed red hexagonal warning labels, with thresholds based on the ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition’s Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024.

On 16 October 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, a draft revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export. It proposes to add 40 technologies, 23 in artificial intelligence, 5 in biotechnology and 12 in solar manufacturing, with 14 proposed as prohibited and 26 as restricted.

The draft is open for public comment until 15 November 2026 and is not in force, but a pre-export registration requirement applies at once: before exporting a listed technology, firms must disclose the parties, the destination, the use and the expected value. Technology already public through open source or published papers is outside the scope.

Because the line falls at transfer rather than use, foreign users can still reach restricted Chinese models through APIs, which keeps them dependent on a Chinese provider, while licences would apply only if the list is adopted. The measure is separate from Announcement No. 50 of 2026 on tunnel-boring machines.

Bharath Reddy, an associate fellow at the Takshashila Institution, reads the draft as a switch Beijing can flip when it chooses. For India, the lesson drawn is to diversify model sources across jurisdictions.

India’s public venture capital works at one remove. The Fund of Funds for Startups, set up in 2016 ‘to address funding gaps and catalyse the domestic venture capital market for startups’, has committed its entire Rs 10,000 crore corpus to 145 AIFs, and over Rs 25,500 crore has been invested in more than 1,370 startups (PIB, 14 February 2026).

The Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0, approved by the Union Cabinet on 14 February 2026 with a corpus of Rs 10,000 crore, was notified on 13 April 2026, with SIDBI as an Implementation Agency and priority for deep tech startups, early growth-stage startups supported by smaller AIFs, and technology-driven and innovative manufacturing startups. The gap Roopa Kudva highlights is at the seed stage: Tracxn, a private data firm, counts seed funding for 1 January to 21 September 2026 down 37 per cent to $698 million, while early-stage funding rose 27 per cent to $4.2 billion.

Software products remain a small slice, about $23 billion of a $315 billion industry in NASSCOM’s FY26 estimates. Because the funds of funds work through AIFs, whether public money reaches seed-stage founders depends on the funds they back.