Current Affairs Quiz 28 August 2026

Statements 1, 3 and 4 are correct, while Statement 2 gets the timeline wrong. As of 19 August 2026, roughly 32.92 crore, about 55.7%, of 59.09 crore PM-JDY accounts are held by women, accident insurance cover was enhanced from ₹1 lakh to ₹2 lakh for new accounts opened after 28 August 2018, with NPCI paying the premium, and PM-JDY accounts are the "J" in the JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) Trinity, serving as the primary vehicle for DBT delivery of welfare benefits. The overdraft facility is actually available after six, not three, months of satisfactory account operation, a number-swap that relies on aspirants approximating the timeline. It helps to fix three PM-JDY numbers together: overdraft after six months of satisfactory operation, an OD limit of ₹10,000, and one account per household.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 wrongly enlarges the CDB's mandate. CDB was established on 12 January 1981 under the Coconuts Development Board Act, 1979, is headquartered in Kochi, and operates across 22 States and Union Territories, and PICCS, Productivity Improvement through Coconut-based Cropping System, provides a 100% cost subsidy of ₹42,000 per hectare for a maximum of 2 hectares per beneficiary, released in two equal annual instalments. CDB is actually the Export Promotion Council for coconut products except those made from coir and husk, which fall under the Coir Board instead, also headquartered in Kochi, a classic conflation of two statutory bodies based in the same city.

India's Phase I Strategic Petroleum Reserve provides 5.33 MT of underground crude oil storage across three locations, Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Mangaluru in Karnataka, and Padur in Karnataka, all operated by Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited, a subsidiary of OIDB. Phase II, approved separately, involves Chandikhol in Odisha and an expansion at Padur, but Phase II execution remains delayed, which means options mentioning Chandikhol alongside Phase I sites are conflating the two phases. It helps to fix the split cleanly: Phase I is Vizag, Mangaluru, and Padur, all operational, while Phase II is Chandikhol plus the Padur expansion, approved but delayed.

Two of the three pairs are correctly matched. Activated carbon derived from coconut shells is indeed used in water purification, air filtration, and gold recovery, and remains India's largest coconut export by volume, and Neera is correctly described as the unfermented sap tapped from the inflorescence of the coconut palm, containing zero alcohol and legally distinct from toddy, which is fermented. Virgin coconut oil is actually cold-pressed, unrefined oil used in the premium health-food and cosmetics segments rather than as an industrial lubricant, a category shift that moves it from its real premium food and cosmetic use into an industrial one.

The black-necked stork is listed under Schedule II of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, as amended by the Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act, 2022, which still provides protection from hunting but with different penal provisions than Schedule I, reserved for species like the tiger, lion, elephant, and Great Indian Bustard, which face an absolute prohibition on hunting. The species is globally assessed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List, though its population trend is declining and it is locally rare in India. Aspirants routinely assume large, iconic wetland birds sit on Schedule I, but Schedule I does not automatically cover all large charismatic fauna — the sarus crane and black-necked stork are both examples worth verifying rather than assuming.

Statements 1, 3 and 4 are correct, while Statement 2 swaps two states' rankings. India ranks first globally in coconut production, with 31.24% of world output, or 20,301 million nuts in 2024-25, Andhra Pradesh records the highest coconut productivity, nuts per hectare, among Indian states, followed by West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, and activated carbon made from coconut shells has consistently dominated India's coconut export volumes. It is actually Kerala, not Tamil Nadu, that has the largest area under coconut cultivation at 7.54 lakh hectares, while Tamil Nadu leads in total production, a swap between area and production rankings that is one of the most repeated traps in agriculture-topic questions — Kerala is the area king, Tamil Nadu the production leader, and Andhra Pradesh the productivity champion.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 conflates two distinct concepts. India has zero operational underground natural gas storage, relying instead on imports, pipelines, domestic production, and commercial inventories with no buffer, and existing underground LPG capacity is roughly 0.14 MT, two caverns at Visakhapatnam and Mangaluru, meaning the proposed 4 MT reserve would represent roughly a 28-30-fold increase. A regasification terminal actually only receives LNG and converts it to natural gas for the grid, and does not constitute strategic storage, since true strategic gas storage requires injecting regasified gas into a depleted reservoir or salt cavern, infrastructure India currently lacks entirely. A regasification terminal receives and converts LNG for immediate use, while underground storage is a genuine buffer stock rather than throughput capacity — the two are easily but wrongly conflated.

Statement 1 alone is correct. Khijadiya Bird Sanctuary is a Ramsar-designated Wetland of International Importance in Jamnagar district, Gujarat, near the Gulf of Kutch. The study was actually conducted by the Gujarat Ecological Education and Research (GEER) Foundation, an autonomous body under the Gujarat Forest Department, not the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, since WII is simply the most prominent wildlife research body and thus a plausible but incorrect substitute. All four nests were actually built on Neltuma juliflora, formerly Prosopis juliflora, an invasive species commonly known as gando baval, rather than on native acacia and fig trees, with the storks adapting to this invasive substrate where native nesting trees were unavailable. GEER Foundation is a Gujarat state body while WII is the central body at Dehradun, and gando baval is the invasive nesting substrate used here despite the species' traditional preference for native trees.

The I-2SEA is a 3,600 km submarine cable system connecting Singapore and Malaysia to India's eastern coast, with landing stations at Visakhapatnam and Chennai, being developed by a consortium including Microsoft, Lightstorm, and Singtel, and targeted for service readiness in Q4 2029. It does not connect directly to Japan, the UAE, Australia, or the Philippines, since these are distractors drawn from the wider global cable network, with the UAE in particular appearing because of the separate West Asia-Mumbai cable corridor already in the news. I-2SEA links Singapore and Malaysia to India's east coast at Vizag and Chennai, and is due for readiness in Q4 2029.

NTS gastroenteritis can progress to invasive bloodstream infection in immunocompromised patients, young children, the elderly, and those with chronic illnesses, and such cases can become life-threatening. NTS actually spreads through multiple routes, including poultry, eggs, raw meat, contaminated ready-to-eat food, and food handlers, with water being only one route rather than the only one, and for uncomplicated NTS gastroenteritis, antibiotics are not recommended, since supportive care with fluids and electrolytes is sufficient, with antibiotics reserved for severe or invasive infections and high-risk groups, given that antibiotic overuse drives antimicrobial resistance. The Widal test also has poor specificity and is not the gold standard even for typhoid, let alone NTS, since blood culture remains the actual gold standard for typhoid diagnosis — two common clinical misconceptions worth remembering are that not all bacterial infections need antibiotics, and that Widal is not the standard test.