Current Affairs Quiz 24 September 2026

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, reproducing Articles 22(1) and 22(2). Statement 3 is incorrect — Article 22(3) expressly excludes enemy aliens and persons detained under a preventive detention law from the benefit of clauses (1) and (2); preventive detention instead has its own regime under clauses (4) to (7), including communication of grounds under 22(5) and review by an Advisory Board. The Supreme Court held on 21 September 2026 that a breach of Article 22(1) renders the arrest unconstitutional and entitles the person to immediate release, not bail, and that a second arrest requires the Magistrate's prior sanction on recorded reasons. This is a scope-extension trap, stretching a genuine safeguard to a category the Constitution expressly excludes.

Option (d) is correct — Article 324(5) protects the Chief Election Commissioner with the same security of tenure as a Supreme Court judge. Option (a) is incorrect, since an Election Commissioner can be removed only on the CEC's recommendation, a weaker protection, making this asymmetry a standard Prelims point. Option (b) is incorrect — Article 324(2) leaves the number of Election Commissioners to the President, and the Commission was a single-member body for long stretches, multi-member continuously only since 1993. Option (c) is incorrect — under the CEC and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023, business is transacted unanimously where possible, but the majority prevails when the CEC and Commissioners differ. This combines an office-swap trap in (a) with an absolute-rule trap in (c).

Statements 1 and 3 are correct. The IMEI is a 15-digit identifier whose first eight digits are the Type Allocation Code (TAC), and Section 42(3)(c) of the Telecommunications Act, 2023 prohibits tampering with telecommunication identifiers, punishable with up to three years' imprisonment or a fine of up to ₹50 lakh, with Section 42(7) making such offences cognizable and non-bailable. Statement 2 is incorrect — TACs are allocated by the GSMA, an industry body, not by the ITU, the UN's telecommunications agency. This is a body-swap trap, substituting a plausible UN agency for an industry association.

Both statements are correct, but the second does not explain the first. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence seized 86 live Tokay Geckos at Mariani, Assam, on 22 September 2026, and the species does carry Schedule I protection domestically alongside an Appendix II CITES listing, while Statement-II correctly describes Appendix II, where trade is permitted with an export permit backed by a non-detriment finding. But the two operate on different planes: the Schedule governs protection within India, while the CITES Appendix governs international trade, so the CITES rule is not the reason for the domestic listing. This is a true-but-unrelated trap, where both facts are accurate but one is wrongly treated as the cause of the other.

Pairs 1, 2 and 3 are correctly matched. Pair 4 is incorrect — the greater one-horned rhinoceros occurs in India and Nepal, not Sri Lanka, found within India in Assam, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, with about 4,075 animals as of 2022. World Rhino Day, observed on 22 September, carried the theme "Keep the Five Alive," with around 27,000 rhinos surviving in the wild against nearly five lakh a century ago; of the five species, only the white rhino is Near Threatened, the one-horned is Vulnerable, and the Javan, Sumatran and black rhinos are Critically Endangered. This is a neighbour-substitution trap, replacing one correct range country with another South Asian country.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct. El Niño is defined by anomalous warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific, which follows a weakening of the easterly trade winds that normally hold warm water in the west, with the accompanying pressure see-saw called the Southern Oscillation, together forming ENSO. Statement 3 reverses the relationship — a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, with warmer waters in the western Indian Ocean, tends to offset El Niño's suppressing effect on the southwest monsoon rather than intensify it; India's rainfall deficit stood at about 15% below normal up to 22 September 2026. This is a direction-reversal trap, reinforced by the absolute word "invariably."

Statements 1 and 2 are correct. A QCO converts a voluntary Indian Standard into a mandatory requirement, so covered products cannot be made, imported, stored or sold without the BIS Standard Mark, and BIS, established under the BIS Act, 2016, is indeed the national standards body under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution. Statement 3 is incorrect, since QCOs apply equally to imports too, which is precisely why trading partners raise them as technical barriers to trade under the WTO's TBT Agreement, flagged at India's eighth Trade Policy Review in July 2026; coverage rose from 88 products in 2019 to 765 by December 2024. This is a domestic-only trap, wrongly confining a regulation to home production and hiding its trade dimension.

Statements 2 and 3 are correct. The New Development Bank was created by the agreement signed at the Fortaleza summit in 2014 and is headquartered in Shanghai, and Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE are indeed members, alongside Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, as listed for the 2026 summit hosted by India. Statement 1 is incorrect — BRICS itself has no charter and no permanent secretariat; the chair rotates annually and decisions are by consensus, and it is the New Development Bank, not the grouping, that is based in Shanghai. This is an institution-transfer trap, attributing a body's headquarters to the grouping that created it.

Option (b) is correct — azoles such as fluconazole, and polyenes, act on ergosterol in the fungal cell membrane. Option (a) is incorrect, since echinocandins such as caspofungin target the cell wall, not the membrane. Option (c) is incorrect, as Candida auris is a yeast, a single oval-celled fungus, while moulds are the filamentous group that includes the dermatophytes. Option (d) is incorrect and is the conceptual key — fungi are eukaryotes, like humans, which is exactly why few selective drug targets exist and why so few antifungal classes have been developed. Recent work on Indian clinical isolates found over 90% azole resistance, Erg11 gene amplification against azoles, and Fks1 mutations against echinocandins. This combines a target-swap between drug classes, a category error, and a fundamental biology error across the wrong options.

All three pairs are correctly matched. The Visegrád Group, formed in 1991, comprises Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with India holding its first Foreign Ministers' meeting in the V4+India format on the UNGA sidelines; the G-4 — India, Brazil, Germany and Japan — support each other's claims to permanent Security Council seats against the Uniting for Consensus group; and P4M (Partners for Multilateralism, International Law, Peace & Prosperity) was founded by leaders of the EU, Brazil, Kenya and Canada, with its New York summit co-chaired by India's External Affairs Minister and the President of the European Council. This is an all-true discomfort set, where three unfamiliar groupings tempt candidates into assuming at least one must be wrong.