Current Affairs Quiz 22 September 2026

Option (c) is correct — Article 371A (13th Amendment, 1962) provides that no Act of Parliament on Naga religious or social practices, customary law, or the ownership and transfer of land applies to Nagaland unless its Legislative Assembly so decides by resolution, with Article 371G giving Mizoram a similar safeguard. Option (a) swaps the authority involved — Article 371H gives this special responsibility to the Governor of Arunachal Pradesh, not the Chief Minister. Option (b) swaps the region — Article 371J concerns the Hyderabad-Karnataka (Kalyana Karnataka) region, while development boards for Vidarbha, Marathwada, Saurashtra and Kutch fall under Article 371. Option (d) swaps the State — the thirty-member minimum is in Article 371I and applies to Goa, while Sikkim's provision is Article 371F. The Centre has now proposed a new Article 371K for Ladakh.

Statement-I is correct — on 18 September 2026 the Court held Rule 18A(2) of the Maharashtra Poisons Rules, 1972 unconstitutional under Articles 14 and 19(1)(g), finding no reasonable and proximate nexus between the additives and preventing methanol misuse in the unregulated illicit-liquor sector. Statement-II is also correct, since intoxicating liquors fall under Entry 8 of the State List, but it does NOT explain Statement-I: the rule fell because it failed the proportionality test, not for want of State legislative competence, and the Court expressly affirmed that States can still regulate methanol, including under the Poisons Act, 1919. This is a true-but-irrelevant trap — both statements are accurate, but only one concerns the actual ground of the ruling.

Only statement 1 is correct — New Zealand will provide duty-free access to 100% of Indian exports from entry into force on 20 October 2026, while India liberalises tariffs on about 95% of New Zealand's exports by value. Statement 2 is incorrect, since India excluded dairy and sensitive farm products such as onions, almonds, chickpeas, peas, artificial honey and sugar, granting NO concessions on them — dairy was also a key reason for India's 2019 exit from RCEP talks. Statement 3 is incorrect too, since India now has trade agreements with all RCEP members except China, not every member. This combines an over-extension trap, where a device used elsewhere (tariff-rate quotas) is wrongly imported into a fully excluded sector, with an absolute-word trap in "every member."

Statements 1 and 3 are correct. Transit passage under UNCLOS Part III (Articles 37–44) is the freedom of navigation and overflight solely for continuous and expeditious transit; it applies to all ships and aircraft, and submarines may pass in their normal submerged mode. The Strait of Singapore, about 105 km long, is the eastern continuation of the roughly 800-km Strait of Malacca and links it to the South China Sea. Statement 2 is incorrect — Article 44 provides that transit passage shall NOT be suspended; it is only innocent passage in the territorial sea that a coastal State may temporarily suspend for security under Article 25(3), where submarines must surface and show their flag. This is a regime-swap trap, attributing a feature of innocent passage to transit passage.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct. Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty bars nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in orbit and reserves the Moon and celestial bodies for exclusively peaceful purposes, while the Liability Convention imposes absolute liability for damage on the Earth's surface or to aircraft in flight, though only fault-based liability for damage caused elsewhere in space. Statement 2 is incorrect, since the Treaty does NOT ban conventional weapons in orbit — which is why disclosure of on-orbit "space control" weapons raises concern without technically breaching Article IV. This is a scope-inflation trap, widening a ban limited to nuclear weapons and WMD to cover all weapons.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct. A Gazette Notification of 23 March 2025 fixed 23 September as Ayurveda Day, replacing the earlier Dhanteras (Dhanvantari Jayanti) observance since 2016, with 2026 marking the 11th Ayurveda Day; and ICD-11 TM2, launched for country testing in New Delhi in January 2024 and formally released in 2025, enables dual coding of Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani diagnoses. Statement 3 is incorrect — the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre is itself located at Jamnagar, Gujarat, as WHO's global outposted centre, not merely a regional office of a Geneva-based headquarters. This is a location-shift trap that demotes the Jamnagar centre's actual global status.

Only pair 1 is correctly matched — biomining separates legacy waste into refuse-derived fuel, bio-soil, recyclables and inert material, as done at Gorakhpur, Bhalswa, Nagpur and Raichur under Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0. Pair 2 describes leachate, not refuse-derived fuel, which is actually the high-calorific fuel made by shredding and drying non-recyclable waste for cement-kiln co-processing. Pair 3 describes bioremediation, not the Miyawaki method — developed by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, it is the dense, multi-layered planting of native species, and Raichur's Yakalaspura site now hosts a Miyawaki forest. Each wrong pair borrows the description of a neighbouring waste-management term.

All three statements are correct. The 2022 Amendment rationalised the Schedules from six to four and removed the rhesus macaque, earlier in Part I of Schedule II, from protection; Section 62 empowers the Centre to declare such an animal vermin for an area and period, and the rhesus macaque had earlier been declared vermin in parts of Himachal Pradesh for limited periods; and the species, being widespread and adaptable, is indeed assessed as Least Concern. After delisting, responsibility for monkey control in Shimla has shifted largely to civic bodies, and victims may fall outside the State's wildlife compensation policy. This is an all-true "discomfort" trap — a species at the centre of a conflict story feels like it should be threatened, tempting rejection of statement 3.

Statement-I is incorrect — the actual sequence is reversed: two mortar-deployed drogue chutes first stabilise the module and cut its speed, and three mortar-ejected pilot chutes then pull out the three main chutes for the final descent, so that even if one main chute fails, the other two can still land the module safely. Statement-II is correct — a cord wound around the canopy limits how far it can spread, and after a preset delay a timed cutter severs the cord so the chute can bloom fully, keeping loads manageable when the module is moving at about 170 m/s (the system is developed by ADRDE, Agra, under DRDO). This is a sequence-reversal trap, presenting the correct stages in the wrong order.

All three statements are correct. Tap & Pay, launched by RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, lets a user tap an NFC-enabled phone on an NFC-enabled terminal and works even without mobile data by using the terminal's own internet connection, with PIN-less payments up to ₹5,000; NPCI, set up in 2008, is indeed a not-for-profit company established by banks under RBI's guidance and operates retail payment systems including UPI, RuPay and IMPS under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007; and RuPay credit cards were linked to UPI in 2022, with Tap & Pay supporting them too. This is an all-true "discomfort" trap — the offline element in statement 1 and the credit-card link in statement 3 sound counter-intuitive for a bank-account-based system, but both hold.