Current Affairs Quiz 19 August 2026

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while Statement 3 is wrong. Article 142 grants the Supreme Court plenary power to pass any order necessary for "complete justice" in matters before it, and the Court held in Union Carbide v. Union of India (1991) that this power can supplement or override statutory provisions to prevent injustice, making it a residuary, extraordinary power. Article 142 is available only to the Supreme Court — High Courts instead exercise their inherent powers to quash FIRs under Section 482 CrPC, now Section 528 BNSS, which is a separate statutory provision. Whenever a question suggests High Courts can also invoke Article 142, that claim is always false.

Both A and R are true, and R directly explains A. The Supreme Court under CJI Surya Kant limited its Article 142 order to FIRs naming only students, excluding persons with serious criminal antecedents such as history-sheeters facing charges like murder or rape, and this rests squarely on the right to peaceful protest flowing from Article 19(1)(b), freedom of assembly, and Article 19(1)(a), freedom of speech. Courts have consistently upheld protest as a legitimate fundamental right, as in the Ramlila Maidan case of 2012, which is precisely why criminalising student protesters through blanket FIRs warranted Article 142 intervention. Candidates sometimes pick option (B) assuming the reason is unrelated, but in assertion-reason questions it is worth checking whether R explains why A happened, not merely whether both are independently true.

Only Statement 2 is correct. PM-CARES Fund is actually a public charitable trust registered under the Registration Act, 1908, not a statutory body under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, and this non-statutory nature is precisely why it is argued to be exempt from RTI obligations. It was notified as an eligible CSR activity under Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013, which enabled corporates to fulfil CSR mandates through it and drove a corpus of roughly ₹7,914 crore in 2020-21, but it is audited by a private auditor rather than the CAG — unlike the PM National Relief Fund, which is also a public trust but is CAG-audited, and this refusal to submit to CAG audit has drawn transparency criticism. A useful distinction to hold onto: PM-CARES is a private trust with a private auditor, PMNRF is a public trust with CAG audit, and both differ from the NDRF, which is a statutory fund under the Disaster Management Act.

Statement 1 is correct, while Statement 2 is incorrect. Corporate investment as a share of India's GDP stood at roughly 10.3% in 2024-25, below even the GFC trough of about 11.3% in 2008-09, and unlike the GFC, which was an external shock, this post-2016 decline was self-inflicted by demonetisation and has never recovered to earlier levels. The 2018 corporate tax cut from 30% to 22% did not revive investment among small firms because such firms are demand-constrained rather than finance-constrained, and Kalecki's Principle of Increasing Risk shows that the cost of credit rises steeply as small firms borrow more, so cheaper credit on paper does not translate into actual investment when demand itself is absent. The underlying insight worth remembering is that supply-side reforms like tax cuts only work once the demand constraint is already satisfied.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 is incorrect. GATS was established in 1995 as part of the WTO agreements and is the first multilateral legally enforceable framework governing international trade in services, and India's largest services export advantage indeed lies in Mode 1, cross-border supply without physical movement, particularly through remotely delivered IT and software services such as BPO and KPO, alongside strong interests in Mode 4 as well. Statement 2 mislabels a mode — commercial presence of a foreign supplier in the importing country describes Mode 3, not Mode 4, which instead refers to the movement of natural persons, meaning individual professionals like doctors, IT workers, or consultants physically relocating to supply services. A helpful way to fix the four modes in memory: Mode 1 is cross-border and remote, Mode 2 is where the consumer travels, Mode 3 is a company setting up a branch, and Mode 4 is a person moving.

All three statements are correct. CBAM, established under EU Regulation 2023/956, began its definitive phase on 1 January 2026 after a transitional reporting-only phase that ran from October 2023, and it covers precisely six carbon-intensive sectors — iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, hydrogen, and electricity — where carbon-pricing gaps between the EU and non-EU producers would otherwise cause "carbon leakage." A June 2026 analysis in Nature Climate Change found that iron and steel make up about 90% of India's CBAM-covered exports to the EU, making India's steel sector the most exposed, with the same study finding that high-emission Indian steel firms cut EU exports during the reporting phase. When a question with several statements all turn out correct, it is worth verifying each independently rather than assuming an "all correct" option must be wrong.

India holds the BRICS Chairmanship in 2026, which is why the 12th BRICS Environment Ministers' Meeting was hosted in New Delhi under India's presidency. The joint statement from the meeting opposed the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism as unilateral, punitive, discriminatory, and protectionist, and called for tripling adaptation finance to developing countries by 2035, in line with a commitment made at the 2025 UN climate conference. It is worth not confusing this with India's 2023 G20 presidency, which was also hosted in New Delhi but is an entirely separate forum — whenever a BRICS meeting is held in New Delhi in this cycle, India is the chair.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 is incorrect. The Akademik Lomonosov is a non-self-propelled floating nuclear power barge carrying two 35 MWe reactor modules, which began commercial operation in May 2020 and is docked at Pevek harbour in Russia's Chukotka region, making it the world's northernmost nuclear plant, and the SHANTI Act's draft rules do require that foreign nuclear technology for Indian plants hold design certification from its country-of-origin regulator and already be operational, a provision that favours Russia's Lomonosov while disadvantaging Western SMR developers like Holtec, Rolls-Royce SMR, and GE-Hitachi BWRX-300, which remain in design certification. Statement 2 gets the reactor type wrong: China's HTR-PM is not a pressurised water reactor but a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor using helium coolant and graphite moderation, though its grid connection in December 2021 is correctly dated. It helps to remember that China's HTR-PM is gas-cooled while Russia's Akademik Lomonosov is a water-cooled PWR variant.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while Statement 3 gets the direction wrong. Helicase uses energy from ATP hydrolysis to change shape and force apart the two DNA strands, and the Y-shaped region where the strands have been separated is called the replication fork, where each exposed single strand serves as a template for a new complementary strand synthesised by DNA polymerase. Topoisomerases actually relieve torsional stress that builds up ahead of the replication fork, not behind it, since the DNA in front becomes increasingly over-twisted as helicase advances and unwinds the helix, and topoisomerases cut and rejoin the strands there to release this positive supercoiling — if they are blocked, as by certain anticancer drugs, the DNA breaks ahead of the fork instead. A useful image is twisting a rope from one end: the twist accumulates in front of where the twisting happens, not behind it.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 states the opposite of the truth. The first Positive Indigenisation List, covering 101 items, was notified in August 2020 under the Defence Acquisition Procedure 2020, inaugurating India's policy of banning imports of specific defence items beyond a set timeline to force domestic production, and the SRIJAN Portal does publish each PIL item with technical specifications and indicative indigenisation timelines so that MSMEs, DPSUs, startups, and private firms can develop domestic alternatives. Items on the list are not mandatorily imported — they are the exact opposite, barred from import beyond a deadline and required to be sourced domestically, with "Positive" referring to a positive list for domestic sourcing rather than approval for import. It helps to remember PIL as a list of items India is positively committed to making at home, where import is forbidden once the deadline passes.