Current Affairs Quiz 18 September 2026

Statement 1 is correct — Article 44 sits in Part IV of the Constitution, and Directive Principles, while fundamental to governance, are not enforceable by any court under Article 37, which is why no citizen can litigate for a UCC. Statement 2 is correct, since the Special Marriage Act, 1954 provides a secular, religion-neutral route to marriage and is often described as a voluntary UCC that has existed for over seventy years. Statement 3 is incorrect — Ambedkar actually advocated a UCC, suggesting it could be made voluntary, with Parliament providing that it apply only to citizens who declare their willingness to be bound by it, and opposition in the Assembly came mainly from members who saw a uniform code as violating the right to religion under Part III. A well-known figure's stance is inverted here, made plausible because the UCC did end up in the non-justiciable Part IV rather than Part III — but that placement was a compromise, not Ambedkar's preference, and the "voluntary UCC" idea is his, not a modern invention.

Statement 1 is incorrect — MDR is paid by the merchant to the payment processors and banks, not by the consumer, and UPI apps are expressly prohibited from levying platform fees or hidden charges on users. Statement 2 is correct, since P2P transfers stay free regardless of amount and account for about 37% of UPI transaction volume. Statement 3 is correct — NPCI is an umbrella organisation for retail payments in India, established in 2008 under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, promoted by the RBI and a group of banks, and it also runs RuPay, IMPS, NACH, AePS, FASTag and BBPS. Under the new structure, 0.4% applies to merchant payments above ₹2,000, capped at ₹300 for transactions of ₹75,000 and above, and 97.5% of UPI transactions by volume remain free overall. The commonest confusion about MDR is who pays it — it is always a merchant-side fee, on cards as on UPI, so a statement claiming the consumer pays it directly is always wrong.

All three pairs are correctly matched. The 1,337-km Eastern DFC runs from Ludhiana in Punjab to Sonnagar in Bihar and strengthens the mineral-industrial axis. The 1,506-km Western DFC runs from Dadri in Uttar Pradesh to JNPT in Navi Mumbai and strengthens the manufacturing-export axis, and together the two give India a 2,843-km dedicated freight backbone. The Union Budget 2026-27 identified a roughly 2,052-km Dankuni–Surat corridor traversing Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha and Maharashtra as a second east-west freight spine. Aspirants trained to expect at least one mismatch in a matching set often reject a correct pair on instinct, so it helps to anchor each corridor by its economic logic — the EDFC serves the eastern mineral belt while the WDFC serves the western ports, with the new Budget corridor linking the eastern mineral belt to Gujarat.

Statement 1 is correct — infrastructure status allows longer-tenure and cheaper credit, which is why the 2022-23 inclusion mattered commercially. Statement 2 is incorrect, since PUE, CUE, CER and WUE standards have been published by the Bureau of Indian Standards, through its technical committee LITD 31, not the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, which instead notified the Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) 2017 and the ECSBC 2024. Statement 3 is correct — the SHANTI Act supports nuclear power for emerging sectors such as AI and data centres and enables SMRs and Micro Nuclear Reactors, with India's installed data-centre capacity having risen from about 375 MW in 2020 to 1.57 GW in August 2026. Two genuine bodies with adjacent mandates are interchanged here, so it helps to separate them by function: BIS writes product and performance standards, while BEE writes energy-efficiency codes and labels — any "-Effectiveness" metric for data centres is a BIS standard, while building codes belong to BEE.

All three statements are correct. Semicon 1.0 (December 2021, ₹76,000 crore) created four schemes covering semiconductor fabs, display fabs, compound semiconductors/silicon photonics/sensors/ATMP-OSAT, and the Design Linked Incentive. The India Semiconductor Mission is the nodal agency under MeitY. Semicon 2.0 (July 2026, ₹1,27,500 crore) rests on six pillars: design, machines and materials, fabs, advanced packaging, applied R&D and talent, with five of twelve phase-one-approved units already in commercial production. This is an "all-true" set built on three separately verifiable data points, year, ministry and outlay, where candidates certain of two often talk themselves out of the third — it's worth remembering that ISM sits under MeitY, never Heavy Industries or Commerce, and that the jump from 1.0 to 2.0 is ₹76,000 crore to ₹1,27,500 crore.

Statement 1 is correct, as that is the standard unit of a carbon credit in both compliance and voluntary markets. Statement 2 is correct — the 'Aadi' programme, run by Grow Indigo with technical guidance from ICAR, credited Direct Seeded Rice, reduced tillage and residue management adopted between 2019 and 2022, verified under Verra's VM0042 methodology, with ₹2.9 crore transferred to 2,550 farmers. Statement 3 is incorrect, since agriculture is not among the obligated sectors of India's Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, 2023, making these voluntary market credits with no domestic compliance buyer, which is why they must be sold abroad. A true domestic scheme, the CCTS, is extended here to a sector it does not yet cover, made to sound natural because the news item is about Indian farmers earning credits — the compliance market covers capped, obligated sectors, while the voluntary market runs on private standards such as Verra and Gold Standard, and Indian farm carbon credits currently sit in the latter.

Statement 1 is incorrect — CITES does not prohibit trade; it regulates it through a permit system so that cross-border trade is legal, sustainable and traceable, and even Appendix-I species may be traded with valid permits where specimens are captive-bred and the purpose is non-commercial. Statement 2 is correct. Statement 3 is correct, as the 2022 amendment harmonised Indian law with CITES by adding a Schedule of listed species. This is the single most frequently tested misconception about CITES, and the same "regulate, not ban" distinction is worth carrying to the Montreal Protocol, the Basel Convention and the Rotterdam Convention — CITES is a licensing treaty, so "prohibits all trade" is always the wrong verb.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct — the 2017 guidelines are the governing document for stem cell research and therapy in India, and haematopoietic stem cell transplantation, in effect a bone-marrow transplant, is the principal proven clinical use. Statement 3 is incorrect, since public health is a State subject, and the 2010 Act applies only in those States and UTs that have adopted it — the Health Ministry's advisory of 16 September 2026 was addressed specifically to those adopting States and UTs, following the Supreme Court's January 2026 judgment restricting stem cell therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder to approved clinical trials. A central health statute is assumed here to apply nationwide when it in fact operates only where States adopt it, so whenever a central Act touches public health, it's worth checking whether it needed State adoption before assuming nationwide force.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct — the Strait of Hormuz is the world's most significant oil transit chokepoint, its traffic separation lanes lie within Iranian and Omani territorial waters, and passage is governed by the regime of transit passage under Part III of UNCLOS. Statement 3 is incorrect, since secondary sanctions are unilateral measures by which one state penalises third-country persons for dealing with a sanctioned target, typically by threatening their access to its financial system, whereas UNSC sanctions are multilateral, binding under Chapter VII, and the only sanctions India accepts as obligatory. Unilateral extraterritorial measures are conflated here with Security Council sanctions, exactly the distinction on which India's stated policy rests — India implements UNSC-mandated sanctions and rejects unilateral ones, and "secondary" always signals a single state acting against a third party, never the UN.

All three statements are correct. The declaration referred to the Bandung spirit, a reference to the Asian-African Conference of 1955, the precursor to the Non-Aligned Movement founded at Belgrade in 1961. Every BRICS declaration since 2022 had carried a reference to Ukraine, and the New Delhi text is the first to drop it. On economic matters, the declaration supported payments in national currencies and referred to a BRICS payment mechanism, though India has not endorsed a permanent mechanism. This is an "all-true" set spanning three separate types of fact, a historical allusion, a negative fact, and a policy position, with the negative fact being the hardest since candidates hesitate to affirm that something was absent — it's worth remembering that Bandung 1955 precedes Belgrade 1961, and a reference to "Bandung spirit" points to the NAM's ancestry, not to NAM membership.