Current Affairs Quiz 29 August 2026

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 is wrong. India became a full member of the SCO in 2017, having been an observer since 2005, and both Belarus and Iran were admitted as full members in 2023. The SCO's permanent secretariat is actually located in Beijing, China, not Almaty, and Almaty's plausibility comes from being Kazakhstan's largest city and a major SCO-related venue, since Kazakhstan was part of the founding "Shanghai Five." It helps to remember the SCO's Beijing secretariat alongside its 2001 Shanghai founding and India's 2017 full membership.

Turkmenistan holds one of the world's largest reserves of natural gas, with the Galkynysh field ranking among the top three globally, while Kazakhstan is instead rich in uranium, zinc, coal, and gold, Uzbekistan has gold, uranium, and natural gas but not at Turkmenistan's scale, and Kyrgyzstan is known for hydropower and gold rather than natural gas. Uzbekistan is a tempting wrong answer since natural gas is genuinely part of its resource profile, but the stem's qualifier "one of the world's largest" is decisive, and only Turkmenistan meets that threshold. It is worth remembering the TAPI pipeline as carrying Turkmenistan's gas to India via Afghanistan and Pakistan.

All three statements are correct. The INSTC bypasses Pakistan, which denies India overland access to Central Asia, by routing through Iran instead, Chabahar port in Iran is the key sea gateway feeding into the INSTC and connecting India northward through Iran to Central Asia and Russia, and India explicitly promotes the INSTC as an alternative connectivity architecture to China's BRI, which has invested heavily across Central Asia. Statement 3 might feel "too political" for a typical UPSC stem, since such stems usually avoid stating geopolitical intent directly, but India's INSTC engagement is genuinely and officially framed partly as a counterweight to BRI, making it a stated policy position rather than an inference.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 is wrong. FCA constitutes roughly 81% of India's reserves, $591.3 bn of a $729.3 bn total as of August 2026, and gold, currently valued at $114.2 bn, is a recognised component of India's official reserves. SDRs are actually not a currency at all, but rather an international reserve asset and a claim on freely usable currencies of IMF member countries, and they cannot be directly traded on open markets, since they are only exchanged between IMF members and prescribed institutions. Statement 2's phrase "freely tradeable on open markets" is the giveaway trap, since SDRs are often loosely called "IMF money" but are in fact allocated by quota and exchanged only among central banks and prescribed holders.

The correct composition for the week ended 21 August 2026 is Foreign Currency Assets at $591.3 billion, Gold at $114.2 billion, SDRs at $18.8 billion, and Reserve Position with the IMF at roughly $4.9 billion. The other options each swap two or more figures across categories, mixing real numbers from the dataset into plausible-looking but incorrect combinations, exploiting uncertainty about which figure belongs to which component. The most reliable anchor is FCA at $591.3 bn, about 81% of the total, with the ordering FCA greater than Gold greater than SDRs holding consistently by size.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while Statement 3 inflates a figure. PM SVANidhi was launched on 1 June 2020 to provide collateral-free working capital loans to urban street vendors who suffered during COVID-19, and the Union Cabinet approved its restructuring on 27 August 2025, extending the scheme to 31 March 2030. The credit limit on the UPI-linked RuPay Credit Card is actually up to ₹30,000, not ₹50,000, a common trap where a round, higher number replaces the specific lower correct figure. It is worth fixing the SVANidhi RuPay Credit Card limit at ₹30,000 firmly, along with MoHUA as the nodal ministry.

"SVANidhi se Samridhhi" specifically refers to the component focused on socio-economic profiling of beneficiary families and convergence, linking street vendors' families to eight Central Government welfare schemes, with over 51.15 lakh families profiled and more than 1.59 crore scheme sanctions made. Option (a) instead describes the Street Food Hub initiative, option (b) describes the PM SVANidhi Startup Challenge, and option (d) describes the Digital Lending Platform, all real SVANidhi components but distinct from Samridhhi. Since all four options describe genuine SVANidhi sub-components, this is a true discrimination question, and the name itself is the clue — "samridhhi" relates to prosperity through social convergence, not infrastructure or technology.

India's three-stage programme uses Natural Uranium in Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors in Stage 1, producing plutonium as a by-product, this plutonium then fuels Fast Breeder Reactors in Stage 2, which also breed U-233 from thorium blankets, and Stage 3 uses this U-233, bred from thorium in Stage 2, as primary fuel in Advanced Heavy Water Reactors, effectively making thorium the long-term fuel base. The other options misplace or misidentify the fuels, particularly by confusing thorium-232, a fertile material, with U-233, the actual fissile product derived from it, since Th-232 cannot directly sustain a chain reaction and must first absorb a neutron inside a reactor to become fissile U-233. The sequence worth memorising is Natural Uranium, then Plutonium in the FBR, then Thorium/U-233 in the AHWR, and India holds the world's third-largest thorium reserves.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while Statement 3 swaps India's reactor choice for the global norm. India operates 24 nuclear reactors with 8.78 GW installed capacity, with nine more units, 7.5 GW, under construction, and the SHANTI Act, 2025 is landmark legislation enabling private sector participation in nuclear power, departing from the exclusively government-owned model under the Atomic Energy Act, 1962. India actually primarily uses Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors, not Light Water Reactors, and PHWRs use Natural Uranium, not Low-Enriched Uranium, with heavy water as moderator, while most other countries instead use LWRs with Low-Enriched Uranium. India is unusual precisely because PHWRs allow use of Natural Uranium without costly enrichment, making the pairing India-PHWR-Natural Uranium versus Most-of-world-LWR-Low-Enriched-Uranium worth fixing firmly.

Commercial satellite internet for rural areas is not a stated objective of the DoT-C-DOT Optical Network Testbed, whose actual stated objectives are bridging the lab-to-market gap for optical technologies, serving as a shared resource for skill development, and testing and validating indigenous optical and quantum security technologies. Satellite internet is a real and separate government priority, associated with programmes like BharatNet and ISRO's GSAT series, which makes it sound plausible for a telecom testbed, but this particular testbed is specifically focused on optical fibre-based terrestrial communication rather than satellite connectivity. The testbed is worth remembering as focused on indigenising the optical core, access layer, and quantum security, located at the C-DOT campus in New Delhi.

Statements 1 and 2 are correct, while Statement 3 reverses the electricity trade-off. Global data centre direct cooling water consumption was approximately 222 billion litres in 2025 per Rystad Energy, and WUE is defined as litres of water consumed per kWh of IT energy load. Dry cooling actually reduces water consumption but increases electricity consumption rather than reducing it, requiring roughly 0.30-0.74 additional kWh of electricity for every kWh of IT load compared to evaporative cooling, the key trade-off candidates who assume dry cooling is "more efficient" across the board often miss. It is worth remembering that dry cooling saves about 2.15 litres of water per kWh but needs 0.30-0.74 kWh of extra electricity, an energy-water nexus trade-off rather than a clean win on both fronts.

Rystad Energy specifically identified Jamnagar in Gujarat and Thane in Maharashtra as Indian cities highly exposed to data centre water stress, meaning they face both high projected data centre water demand and existing high ambient water stress. The other options list cities that are major data centre hubs in India, including Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Noida, and Gurugram, making them plausible distractors precisely because of their prominence, but none of these were specifically named in the Rystad Energy report. Jamnagar and Thane are worth remembering together as India's most water-stressed data centre exposure locations per the 2026 Rystad report, less prominent in public data-centre awareness but the actual correct recall answer.

The contingent escalation clause specifies that if YouTube, TikTok, and Snap adopt comparable safety safeguards and make matching payments, stricter restrictions kick in, including a 60-minute daily limit on each platform, down from the 2-hour combined limit on Facebook and Instagram, with about 30% of the $17 billion settlement also contingent on these rivals adopting similar measures, creating financial incentives for industry-wide adoption. Options A, B, and D describe clauses that do not exist in the actual settlement, and since each sounds legally reasonable, this is essentially a pure current-affairs recall question rather than one solvable by logic alone. The clause is worth remembering as: if YouTube, TikTok, and Snap act similarly, the 60-minute-per-platform limit activates, with 30% of the $17 billion tied to that condition.

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statement 2 misreads the legal effect of the settlement. Meta agreed to a combined 2-hour daily limit across Facebook and Instagram for under-18 users, with only a verified parent able to increase it, and an independent auditor must assess compliance with the safeguards for five years. The consent judgment actually explicitly states the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing by Meta and does not establish a standard of care or statutory benchmark for liability, even though "why else pay $17 billion" feels like a natural inference. In US law, consent judgments routinely include "no admission of liability" clauses that let companies settle without creating legal precedent for other cases, so it is worth remembering that a settlement is not automatically an admission of wrongdoing.

The only known Buddhist monastery in Central Asia is at Fayaztepe in Uzbekistan, with Tashkent, Uzbekistan's capital, having been an important centre during the Kushana era when Buddhist influence spread into Central Asia, a historical connection cited as part of India's civilisational links with Uzbekistan. The other options name real and historically significant cities in the correct countries, but incorrectly associate them with Buddhist monasteries that do not exist at those locations, and Merv in Turkmenistan is a particularly strong distractor since it was indeed a major Silk Road city with genuine Buddhist history, but the only actual monastery site is Fayaztepe, not Merv. It is worth fixing Fayaztepe plus Uzbekistan as the sole known Central Asian Buddhist monastery, tied to the Kushana-era connection with India.