Current Affairs Quiz 12 October 2026

Statement 1 is incorrect — the CACP is an attached office of the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, set up in January 1965 as the Agricultural Prices Commission by executive resolution and renamed in 1985, so it is not a statutory body; the Essential Commodities Act, 1955 deals with controlling the supply and distribution of essential commodities, not with recommending prices. Statement 2 is correct — the CACP recommends MSPs for 22 mandated crops and the Fair and Remunerative Price for sugarcane, and the final decision rests with the CCEA. Statement 3 is correct — following the Union Budget 2018-19 announcement, MSPs are fixed at at least 1.5 times the all-India weighted average cost of production, benchmarked to the A2+FL cost, which is paid-out costs plus the imputed value of family labour. To test any "statutory" claim, ask which Act and which section created the body. Under the Mission for Aatmanirbharta in Pulses, NAFED and NCCF are to buy 100% of the tur, urad and masoor that registered farmers offer at MSP, for 2025-26 to 2028-29.

Statement-I is correct — a pulse crop leaves residual nitrogen in the soil through its roots and crop residues, so the next cereal crop needs less urea, which is why pulses are recommended for crop rotation and intercropping. Statement-II is correct and explains Statement-I — Rhizobium in the root nodules carries out biological nitrogen fixation, using the enzyme nitrogenase to convert N₂ into ammonia, and this enrichment of the soil is the direct reason the following crop needs less fertiliser. Use the "because" test: "Pulses cut the fertiliser need of the next crop because their root nodules fix nitrogen" describes a genuine cause. Nitrogenase works only in a low-oxygen setting, which the pink pigment leghaemoglobin maintains in the nodule. Pulses contain 20–25% protein, and the Pulses Mission plans to expand pulse area in rice-fallow lands.

Pair 1 is correct — PM-AASHA (Pradhan Mantri Annadata Aay SanraksHan Abhiyan, 2018) is an umbrella scheme with three components: the Price Support Scheme (PSS), the Price Deficiency Payment Scheme (PDPS) for oilseeds, and a pilot Private Procurement & Stockist Scheme (PPSS). Pair 2 is incorrect — NAFED, set up in 1958, is a multi-State cooperative society, while the body created under the Food Corporations Act, 1964 is the Food Corporation of India. Pair 3 is correct — PM-KUSUM (2019, Ministry of New & Renewable Energy) has three components: decentralised solar plants on farm land (A), standalone solar pumps (B), and solarisation of grid-connected pumps (C). Pair 4 is incorrect — the Kisan SAMPADA Yojana is a food-processing scheme of the Ministry of Food Processing Industries, whereas "Per Drop More Crop" is the micro-irrigation component that began under the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (2015). When two schemes share an acronym, tie each one to its ministry.

Statement 1 is incorrect — the ratio runs the other way: cropping intensity = (gross cropped area ÷ net sown area) × 100, where 100% means a single crop a year and higher values indicate multiple cropping, so it can exceed 100% only if the larger figure (gross cropped area) is on top. Low cropping intensity is one of the three indicators used to choose the 100 districts under the PM Dhan-Dhaanya Krishi Yojana, the other two being low productivity and low credit disbursement. Statement 2 is incorrect — taxes on agricultural income are in Entry 46 of the State List, while Entry 82 of the Union List lets the Centre tax income other than agricultural income. Agriculture itself is Entry 14 of the State List, which is why PMDDKY district plans are routed through State departments' annual action plans.

Option (a) is correct — under the OMSS(D), the Food Corporation of India sells surplus wheat and rice from the Central Pool, mostly through e-auctions at reserve prices, to bulk buyers, processors and at times State governments, in order to raise supply in the lean season and moderate open-market prices. Option (b) is incorrect, since OMSS is a sale, not a purchase, and procurement happens at MSP; (c) is incorrect, as exports are governed by trade policy, not by OMSS; and (d) is incorrect, because PDS grain is procured by the FCI and State agencies, not by private traders. Option (b) describes the opposite operation using the same agency and vocabulary, so fix on the word "Sale" in the scheme's name before reading the options. The op-ed notes that rice stocks are more than four times the buffer norm and wheat stocks nearly three times, and OMSS is one of the main channels for drawing down such surpluses.

Statement 1 is correct — the GEAC cleared Bt cotton in 2002; it carries a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and is still the only GM crop grown commercially on a large scale in India. Statement 2 is incorrect — the GEAC functions under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, constituted under rules made in 1989 under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; it sounds agricultural because it approves crops, but its mandate is the release of GM organisms into the environment. Statement 3 is correct — the PMFBY (from Kharif 2016) caps the farmer's share of the premium at 2% for Kharif food and oilseed crops, 1.5% for Rabi food and oilseed crops, and 5% for annual commercial and horticultural crops, with the Centre and the States sharing the balance. Statement 4 is correct — the Narmada rises at Amarkantak and flows west through a rift valley between the Vindhyas and the Satpuras into the Gulf of Khambhat, and the Sardar Sarovar dam in Gujarat is built on it.

Statement 1 is correct — Section 4(1)(b) lists 16 categories of information, plus a residual clause, that must be published proactively, and Section 4(2) asks public authorities to disclose enough that the public needs to use the Act as little as possible; a newspaper check found that only 33 of 94 Union department websites carried their 2024-25 transparency audit. Statement 2 is incorrect — the CIC is a statutory body, constituted under Section 12 of the RTI Act, while Article 338 provides for the National Commission for Scheduled Castes. Statement 3 is correct — Section 24, read with the Second Schedule, excludes the listed organisations, but information on corruption and human rights violations must still be provided, the latter only with the CIC's approval. The constitutional bodies are a short list — Election Commission (Art. 324), UPSC (315), Finance Commission (280), CAG (148), and NCSC (338), NCST (338A) and NCBC (338B) — and the CIC is not among them.

Statement 1 is correct — the original Act fixed a five-year term, or until the age of 65, and pegged salaries to those of the Election Commission, whereas the 2019 amendment left these matters to rules made by the Centre, and the 2019 Rules set a three-year term. Statement 2 is incorrect — the amendment did the reverse: Section 44(3) of the DPDP Act replaced Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act with a blanket exemption for "information which relates to personal information", and in doing so deleted the earlier proviso that allowed disclosure when the larger public interest justified it. Critics argue that this narrows the RTI regime. When a statement describes an amendment, ask whether it widened or narrowed the right; the recent change to Section 8(1)(j) narrowed it.

Statement-I is correct — Section 43D(5) was added by the 2008 amendment, applies to offences in the chapters on terrorist activities and terrorist organisations, and reverses the ordinary presumption in favour of bail; in NIA v. Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali (2019), the Court held that at this stage courts should look at the prosecution material broadly, without weighing the evidence in detail. Statement-II is correct, but it does not explain Statement-I — Najeeb created an exception, holding that statutory bail restrictions do not override Article 21 when the trial cannot finish in reasonable time, so it is a limit on Section 43D(5), not the reason the provision exists. The "because" test fails here: "Courts must refuse bail under S.43D(5) because Najeeb allows bail after long incarceration" is a contradiction, not an explanation, and when Statement-II describes an exception to Statement-I the answer is usually (b).

Pair 1 is incorrect — Gopalan took the opposite view, treating each fundamental right as a separate, self-contained code, so a detention law had to satisfy only Article 21's "procedure established by law"; Maneka Gandhi later rejected this approach. Pair 2 is correct — Maneka Gandhi held that Articles 14, 19 and 21 are interlinked and that the procedure must be just, fair and reasonable rather than arbitrary. Pair 3 is correct — Hussainara Khatoon, a PIL on undertrials in Bihar's jails, held that a speedy trial is implicit in Article 21. Pair 4 is incorrect — the Constitution Bench upheld TADA while laying down safeguards against misuse, and TADA later lapsed in 1995. Both false pairs attach the opposite of what the Court decided; Gopalan (narrow, 1950) and Maneka (broad, 1978) form a before-and-after pair, and special anti-terror laws such as TADA and POTA (PUCL, 2003) were upheld by the Court and later ended by Parliament.

Statement 1 is correct — Shor's algorithm (1994) solves integer factorisation and discrete logarithms efficiently, so a large enough quantum computer running it would break RSA, Diffie–Hellman and elliptic-curve cryptography, which underpin key exchange and digital signatures in banking. Statement 2 is correct — Quantum Key Distribution (first protocol: BB84, 1984) relies on the fact that measuring a quantum state disturbs it, so any eavesdropping on the key exchange can be detected. Statement 3 is incorrect — Grover's algorithm (1996) gives only a quadratic speed-up in brute-force search, roughly halving the effective key length, so AES-256 is still considered adequate and the response is longer keys, not abandoning symmetric encryption. "Completely insecure" overstates a real but partial effect: quantum attacks break public-key cryptography but only weaken symmetric cryptography. In August 2024, NIST published its first post-quantum standards: FIPS 203 (ML-KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA) and FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA), and "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" attacks make migration urgent for long-lived banking data.

Option (d) is correct — since 1967, the second has been defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation from the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. Option (a) is incorrect, as definitions based on the Earth's rotation were abandoned because that rotation is irregular; (b) is incorrect, since quartz oscillators are secondary timekeepers that must be calibrated; and (c) is incorrect, because thorium-229 powers the first working nuclear clocks reported in Nature, but these are prototypes and the second has not been redefined. Option (c) comes from today's headline and is placed to catch candidates who read the news but not the detail; in "is at present defined" questions, choose the established standard, not the newest technology. Optical atomic clocks based on strontium or ytterbium are the leading candidates for a future redefinition, and in India CSIR–National Physical Laboratory maintains Indian Standard Time.

Statement 1 is correct — it was declared India's National Aquatic Animal in 2009, and Assam has also made it its State aquatic animal. Statement 2 is correct — it is in Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and is also listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List and in CITES Appendix I. Statement 3 is correct — the Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary, along the Ganga near Bhagalpur in Bihar, was notified in 1991 and was India's first protected area dedicated to this species. Don't hunt for a false statement: UPSC does set questions in which every statement is correct, and if each matches a fact you can name (2009, Schedule I, Bhagalpur), trust it. The usual traps on this species lie elsewhere — it is functionally blind and hunts by echolocation. A proposed 55 MW hydropower-cum-irrigation project on the Kulsi river (Assam–Meghalaya border) is opposed partly because dams fragment dolphin habitat.

Statement-I is correct — sea turtles show temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), in which warmer sand produces more females, and a study of green turtles from the northern Great Barrier Reef found that young turtles there were overwhelmingly female. Statement-II is incorrect — sea turtles have no sex-determining chromosomes, and their sex is set by the incubation temperature during a critical window of embryonic development; chromosomal sex determination, such as XX/XY in mammals and ZZ/ZW in birds, is a different system. The trap replaces the correct mechanism (temperature) with a real mechanism (chromosomes) from other animal groups: XX/XY covers mammals and many frogs, ZZ/ZW covers birds and snakes, and TSD covers crocodilians, most turtles and the tuatara. Agile frogs use an XX/XY system, yet heat in the tadpole stage turns some genetic females into fertile males, and a study in Science Advances found that these sex-reversed males father far fewer offspring, which raises extinction risk as the climate warms.

Statement 1 is correct — the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro is often marketed as Europe's southernmost fjord, but no glacier shaped it; it is a drowned river valley, a ria, entered through the narrow Verige Strait. Statement 2 is incorrect — that describes a ria, whereas fjords are U-shaped glacial troughs, very deep inland and usually with a shallow rock sill near the mouth, as in Norway's Sognefjord and the fjords of Chile and New Zealand. Statement 3 is correct — Borneo is divided among Indonesia (Kalimantan), Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) and Brunei, and this year's fires there have displaced orangutans. Statement 4 is correct — the canal's locks lift ships across the isthmus using fresh water from Gatun Lake, which is why droughts in 2023–24 forced limits on transits. Think of the agent: rivers cut V-shaped valleys, while glaciers carve U-shaped troughs and leave a sill. Bonus trap: Milford Sound (New Zealand) is a fjord despite its name, and Kotor is a ria despite its marketing.