Current Affairs Quiz 24 October 2026

The INSTC is a multimodal transport corridor: freight moves on more than one mode of transport along the way. It was established on 12 September 2000 in St Petersburg by India, Iran and Russia, and later expanded to include Azerbaijan, Armenia and other countries.

It connects the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea through Iran, and then to St Petersburg and northern Europe through Russia; The Indian Express describes it as about 7,200 km long, for moving freight among India, Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Central Asia and Europe. India’s energy stake in Azerbaijan runs through ONGC Videsh, which has invested more than US$ 1.2 billion in the ACG fields and the BTC pipeline.

On 29 November 2024 OVL acquired an additional 0.615 per cent participating interest in ACG from Equinor, raising its stakes to 2.925 per cent in ACG and 3.097 per cent in BTC. Trade is small and volatile: by the MEA’s calendar-year figures it was US$ 401 million in 2025, with imports of US$ 175 million, mostly crude oil.

For Mains, connectivity (the INSTC) and energy (ACG and BTC) are the two reasons Azerbaijan matters to India.

A treaty passes through stages, and the exam tests which stage a text has reached. Initialling marks a text as agreed; signature and ratification are separate steps, and a text that is only initialled is not yet in force.

The Armenia-Azerbaijan case shows the difference. At a Peace Summit at the White House on 8 August 2025, President Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan signed the Joint Declaration for peace, while the draft ‘Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and Inter-State Relations between the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan’ was initialled by the two foreign ministers.

As of September 2026, the Council on Foreign Relations noted that full ratification hinges on Armenia amending its constitution to remove territorial claims, so the agreement remained initialled, not signed. The summit also produced TRIPP, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a multimodal transit route; the joint statement of the United States, Armenia and Azerbaijan on the summit’s first anniversary said it ‘is moving from vision to reality’.

India’s stated principle, in Jaishankar’s words, is that ‘disputes should be settled through dialogue and diplomacy.’

United Nations Day falls on 24 October and, in the UN’s words, ‘marks the entry into force in 1945 of the United Nations Charter’. Reform of the Security Council is debated in the General Assembly under the agenda item ‘Question of Equitable representation on and increase in the membership of Security Council’.

Speaking under it on 22 October 2026, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN said that an organisation that cannot renew its principal organ will find it ever harder to command authority in a world that has moved far beyond 1945, and added: ‘We cannot reasonably drive into the future by constantly looking at the rearview mirror’. India’s argument is about legitimacy: authority won in 1945 cannot make up for a Council that is unrepresentative today.

India is also vying for a non-permanent seat for the 2028-29 term. Keep the forms apart in an answer: a statement in a General Assembly debate is not a resolution, and no vote or outcome text followed this one.

For the Council’s composition, the veto and the Charter’s amendment rule, read this site’s analysis of Shashi Tharoor’s column of 22 October 2026 in The Indian Express.

A cyclone grows in stages, and the Bay of Bengal system of October 2026 shows them in order. A low-pressure area formed over the east-central and adjoining southeast Bay of Bengal at 5.30 a.m. on 23 October 2026.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) said it would intensify into a depression on Saturday, was very likely to move west-northwest and intensify further into a deep depression by 25 October, and would then develop into a cyclonic storm on 26 October. Its likely track is towards the north Andhra Pradesh and adjoining south Odisha coast around the early morning hours of 28 October, although the IMD had yet to forecast the exact area of landfall.

If it becomes a cyclonic storm, it will be named Arnab, a name proposed by Bangladesh; naming of cyclones over the North Indian Ocean began in September 2004. Odisha’s preparedness shows the chain before landfall: a red alert for heavy rain in Puri, Ganjam and Gajapati districts on 27 October, leave of officials cancelled, fishermen advised to return to the coast, and the National Disaster Response Force and the Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force on standby.

The Oskar Klein Medal is named after the Swedish theoretical physicist Oskar Klein and ‘is awarded annually by Stockholm University and the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’. It was established in 1988, and its first three recipients were the Nobel laureates Chen-Ning Yang, Steven Weinberg and Hans Bethe.

The 2026 medal goes to the string theorist Ashoke Sen, an ICTS-Infosys Madhava Chair Professor, whom ICTS calls ‘the first Indian physicist to receive the honour’. ICTS cites his work on S-duality, the precision counting of black-hole entropy and string field theory, which helped shape modern string theory.

His earlier honours include the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2012), the Dirac Medal (2014), the Infosys Prize in Mathematical Sciences (2009), the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (1994), the ICTP Prize (1989), the Padma Shri (2001) and the Padma Bhushan (2013); he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998. For Prelims, remember that a medal co-awarded by the Nobel Committee for Physics is still not a Nobel Prize.

World Polio Day falls on 24 October, and the examinable point is how polio-free certification works. The WHO’s South-East Asia regional office puts it plainly: 'No single country can be certified as polio-free.

WHO regions as a whole are certified as polio-free.’ The WHO South-East Asia Region, which covers India, was certified polio-free on 27 March 2014. India’s own milestone came earlier: ‘The last confirmed WPV case in India occurred in January 2011,’ the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records, WPV being the wild poliovirus.

So two dates belong together in an answer: January 2011 for India’s last confirmed wild poliovirus case, and 27 March 2014 for the certification of the Region as a whole. The wording matters in Prelims: ‘India was certified polio-free on its own’ is wrong, because WHO certifies regions, and India is covered by the Region’s 2014 certification.

For Mains, regional certification shows that eradication is judged across a whole region, not one country at a time.

The Indo-Tibetan Border Police marks its raising day on 24 October. According to the force’s own history page, it was raised on 24 October 1962 'for reorganizing the frontier intelligence and security set up along the Indo-Tibetan border.

Only four Battalions were sanctioned to begin with.’ Its legal basis changed over time, and this is the part Prelims tests. The force was first raised under the CRPF Act; only in 1992 did Parliament enact a law of its own, the ITBPF Act, and the rules under that Act were framed in 1994.

So three dates go together: 1962 for the raising, 1992 for the Act and 1994 for the rules. For Mains, the ITBP is a force raised for a specific frontier, which is why its history begins with reorganising intelligence and security along the Indo-Tibetan border rather than with general policing.

For the force’s border role and its chief’s recent remarks on Arunachal Pradesh, see this site’s roundup of 23 October 2026.

The Monetary Policy Committee is a creature of statute. Section 45ZB of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, inserted by the Finance Act, 2016 and in force from 27 June 2016, sets up a six-member committee: the RBI Governor as chairperson, the Deputy Governor in charge of monetary policy, one RBI officer nominated by the Central Board, and three persons appointed by the Central Government.

It determines the policy repo rate needed to achieve the inflation target, and its decision binds the RBI. Under section 45ZI, the RBI must hold at least four meetings a year; the quorum is four, including the Governor or, in his absence, the Deputy Governor on the committee; each member has one vote, and in a tie the Governor has a second or casting vote.

Members appointed by the Centre serve four years and are not eligible for re-appointment (section 45ZD). Minutes are published on the fourteenth day after each meeting (section 45ZL).

Under section 45ZA, the Centre, in consultation with the RBI, sets the CPI target every five years: 4 per cent, plus or minus 2 per cent, renewed on 25 March 2026 to March 2031. If the RBI fails to meet the target, it must report to the Central Government (section 45ZN).

A supply shock, such as dearer crude oil or a poor harvest, first lifts the prices it touches directly: fuel, transport, food. Monetary policy can do little about that first round; as RBI Deputy Governor Poonam Gupta put it in May 2026, food and fuel prices are ‘inherently volatile and primarily driven by supply-side factors such as monsoon variability and global commodity cycles, on which monetary policy has limited traction’.

The MPC’s rationale says that ‘monetary policy primarily acts by curtailing second round effects (inflation expectations and firm level pricing behaviour, etc.), which take time to manifest and are difficult to extract from available data’. If households expect higher prices, workers seek higher wages and firms raise prices in advance, a one-time shock becomes generalised.

The RBI watches four signs of this: core inflation, diffusion indices, inflation expectations from its bi-monthly Households’ Inflation Expectations Survey, and firm-level pricing. In the survey’s September 2026 round, covering 19 major cities, the median expectation for the next three months rose 70 basis points to 9.9 per cent.

The minutes add a caution: second-round effects are hard to tell apart from the indirect cost of dearer energy and inputs, because both show up in the same indicators.

Prohibition in India rests on a Directive Principle and a State subject. Article 47, in Part IV, asks the State to endeavour to bring about prohibition of intoxicating drinks and of drugs injurious to health, except for medicinal purposes; under Article 37 this cannot be enforced by any court, but it is ‘fundamental in the governance of the country’.

Entry 8 of the State List covers intoxicating liquors, from production and manufacture to possession, transport, purchase and sale, so each State chooses its own policy. Bihar went furthest.

The Bihar Excise (Amendment) Act, 2016 amended the law on 31 March 2016; country liquor was banned from 1 April 2016 and foreign liquor by a notification of 5 April 2016. The Patna High Court set that notification aside on 30 September 2016, and the Supreme Court stayed the High Court’s judgment on 7 October 2016.

The Bihar Prohibition and Excise Act, 2016 took over later that year. Since then the State has eased penalties: a 2018 amendment made certain penalties less stringent, and on 30 March 2022 the Assembly passed a Bill letting first-time offenders get bail from the duty magistrate on a fine, subject to the Governor’s approval.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announced Indian itinerary named Mumbai and Jamnagar, not New Delhi, for 20 to 22 October 2026; he held talks with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in Mumbai on 20 October and visited Reliance’s Jamnagar refinery. The Hindu lists what New Delhi hoped for: moves towards concluding the Bilateral Trade Agreement, reassurance on US sanctions on the import of Russian oil, preparation for Trump-Modi meetings expected at the ASEAN summit in Manila and the G-20 summit in Miami, plans for a Quad summit that India has been trying to host, and a date for President Trump’s India visit.

The sanctions backdrop is a US law, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, whose duties were waived by an executive order of 16 October 2026; the waiver eased the pressure without removing the uncertainty. In The Hindu’s view, trade, tariffs, H-1B restrictions and anti-immigrant measures remain unaddressed, and Rubio ‘must walk that talk’.

C. Raja Mohan, writing in The Indian Express on 21 October 2026, read the Jamnagar stop differently, as a sign that Indian capital is becoming part of India’s diplomatic arsenal. The leader-level meetings are expected, not held.

Drugs and poisons are Entry 19 of the Concurrent List, so Parliament legislates on them; its main law is the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (Act 61 of 1985), which consolidated and amended the law under the Opium Act, 1878 and the Dangerous Drugs Act, 1930, and has been amended in 1989, 2001, 2014 and 2021. The 2001 reform set up a graded system: deterrent sentences for those who traffic in significant quantities, and less severe punishment for addicts and those who commit less serious offences.

Section 37 makes every offence cognizable and, in commercial-quantity cases, allows bail only on twin conditions, which the Supreme Court held mandatory in State of Punjab v. Balraj Singh @ Billa on 2 June 2026. The treatment side is thin.

The national survey run by NDDTC, AIIMS in 2018, whose report was released on 18 February 2019, found about 14.6 per cent of Indians aged 10 to 75 currently using alcohol, about 5.2 per cent affected by harmful or dependent use, and just about one in 38 people with alcohol dependence reporting any treatment. For Mains, the Act’s logic supports a split: firm policing for supply, treatment for users.

Electricity distribution has long meant one licensee per area, but the Electricity Act, 2003 allows more. A proviso to Section 14 says ‘the Appropriate Commission may grant a licence to two or more persons for distribution of electricity through their own distribution system within the same area’.

A licence of this kind is called a parallel distribution licence, and for an area within a State the Appropriate Commission is the State’s regulator. In Haryana, the Haryana Electricity Regulatory Commission on 19 October 2026 granted a 25-year parallel licence to Eleven Power Private Limited for Gurugram and Nuh districts; the company’s business plan puts capital expenditure at Rs 4,717 crore over five years, The Indian Express reported.

The State government had said it would challenge the order before the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity; on Friday 23 October, The Hindu reported, it decided to seek a review and cancellation of the order, and electricity employees called off their strike. For Mains, a parallel licence can give consumers a choice of supplier and so bring competition into distribution, while the State’s challenge shows the friction that can arise between a State government and its own regulator.