Current Affairs Quiz 31 August 2026

Statements 1 and 3 are correct, while Statements 2 and 4 are wrong. India, along with Pakistan, became a full SCO member in 2017 at the Astana summit, and RATS, the SCO's counter-terrorism body, is headquartered in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Statement 2 gets one detail wrong even though the SCO's founding in 2001 and its Beijing secretariat are both correct facts individually, the statement as given conflates them awkwardly with the founding document having actually been signed in Shanghai, and Statement 4 is incorrect since the SCO has no collective defence clause equivalent to NATO's Article 5, focusing instead on security cooperation, counter-terrorism, trade, and connectivity without committing members to mutual military defence. It helps to fix the pairing: RATS sits in Tashkent while the Secretariat sits in Beijing, and India joined at the 2017 Astana summit.

Pairs 1, 2 and 4 are correctly matched, while Pair 3 is wrong. The Tashkent Agreement was signed on 10 January 1966 by PM Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistan's President Ayub Khan, ending the 1965 war, with Shastri dying of a cardiac arrest in Tashkent that same night, Babur was born in Andijan in the Fergana Valley, present-day Uzbekistan, and founded the Mughal Empire in 1526 after the First Battle of Panipat, and the 2026 state visit set a bilateral trade target of $5 billion annually by 2030, up from the current $1 billion-plus. The "Oliy Darajali Do'stlik" Order is actually Uzbekistan's highest honour reserved for foreign leaders, not a domestic civilian decoration awarded to all heads of state, and it was conferred specifically on PM Modi by President Mirziyoyev in August 2026. "Do'stlik" means "Friendship" in Uzbek, and it is worth remembering this honour is foreign-leader-specific rather than a blanket civilian award.

The creamy layer concept among OBCs was judicially introduced by the Supreme Court's nine-judge Constitution Bench in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), commonly called the Mandal Commission case. The Mandal Commission of 1980 recommended OBC reservation but did not itself introduce the creamy layer concept, the 1993 DoPT Office Memorandum operationalised the creamy layer by laying down income and wealth criteria, coming after the court ruling rather than before it, and the 77th Amendment of 1995 introduced reservations in promotions for SC/ST under Article 16(4A), unrelated to the OBC creamy layer. It is worth fixing the sequence firmly: Mandal supplied the recommendation, Indra Sawhney (1992) originated the creamy layer, and the 1993 DoPT OM operationalised it.

Statements 2, 3 and 4 are correct, while Statement 1 misidentifies the recipient of the FIR copy. The Supreme Court in Youth Bar Association of India v. UoI (2016) gave pan-India directions requiring FIRs to be uploaded on official police websites within 24 hours, extendable to 48-72 hours for connectivity issues, sensitive offences such as sexual offences, POCSO cases, and terror offences may be withheld from online upload through a reasoned order by an officer of at least DSP rank, and the BNSS, 2023 replaced the CrPC, 1973 and came into force in July 2024. Section 173(2) of the BNSS actually requires the FIR copy to be given forthwith to the informant or victim, not the accused, since the accused only receives the FIR after the chargesheet is filed before the magistrate under Section 230 BNSS. It is worth fixing this recipient distinction firmly, since UPSC frequently tests exactly who receives which document at which stage.

Rani Avantibai Lodhi (1831-1858) was the queen of Ramgarh, located in present-day Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, and when her husband fell ill and the British invoked the Doctrine of Lapse, she raised an army of roughly 4,000 soldiers and fought pitched battles at Kheri and Ghughri before choosing death over surrender on 20 March 1858. Jhansi is instead associated with Rani Lakshmibai, Awadh with Begum Hazrat Mahal, and Nagpur, annexed by the British via the Doctrine of Lapse in 1854 under Raghoji III Bhonsle, has no prominent woman fighter directly associated with its resistance. It helps to memorise the trio together: Avantibai equals Ramgarh in MP, Lakshmibai equals Jhansi in UP, and Hazrat Mahal equals Awadh in UP.

The Doctrine of Lapse was aggressively implemented by Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, under which princely states without a natural male heir were annexed by the British, denying rulers the right to adopt heirs. States annexed under Dalhousie via the Doctrine of Lapse included Satara (1848), Jaitpur and Sambalpur (1849), Udaipur (1852), Jhansi (1853), Nagpur (1854), and Awadh (1856, for alleged misgovernance), a policy that directly fed into the 1857 revolt. Lord Wellesley instead introduced the Subsidiary Alliance system, Lord Bentinck abolished Sati in 1829 and reformed education, and Lord Canning was Governor-General during the 1857 revolt and became the first Viceroy of India.

All four statements are correct. Veterinary diclofenac, an NSAID, causes fatal renal failure in vultures that consume carcasses of treated livestock, and India banned it for veterinary use in 2006, one of the most consequential wildlife conservation decisions in recent decades, the Oriental White-backed Vulture is classified as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, having suffered a population collapse of over 99%, and a Dehradun study published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa specifically identified electrocution as the most under-reported anthropogenic threat, since researchers have focused heavily on NSAIDs while overlooking power infrastructure risk. The Wildlife Institute of India is an autonomous institute under the MoEFCC, headquartered in Dehradun, Uttarakhand. When every statement in a set checks out, it is worth verifying each independently rather than assuming the "all correct" option must be a trap.

Statements 1, 3 and 4 are correct, while Statement 2 misnames the developers. The Javelin is a man-portable, fire-and-forget ATGM whose infrared imaging seeker locks onto the target's heat signature, guiding itself autonomously after launch so the operator can immediately take cover, unlike wire-guided systems, India's Javelin deal uses the US Foreign Military Sales, government-to-government, route with co-production or co-assembly arrangements involving Bharat Dynamics Limited, and the Milan-2T, French-origin, and Konkurs, Soviet-origin, are the legacy wire-guided systems being replaced, both requiring the operator to guide the missile to the target. The Javelin is actually jointly developed by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, not Boeing and Northrop Grumman, with the "Javelin Joint Venture" being the name of this actual production partnership.

Statements 1, 3 and 4 are correct, while Statement 2 states the opposite of the IPCC's actual position. Counterfactual modelling, running models for a pre-industrial world at 280 ppm CO₂ and comparing outputs with the present-day world above 420 ppm, is the core methodology of attribution science, sub-daily rainfall events involve fast-changing atmospheric processes that most global climate models cannot resolve at the required spatial (≤10 km) and temporal scale, making their attribution particularly uncertain, and World Weather Attribution is an international research group focused specifically on extreme event attribution, having analysed events including the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome and South Asian heatwaves. The IPCC AR6 actually acknowledged the limits of local attribution and noted that short-duration, localised events remain among the hardest to attribute, the opposite of Statement 2's claim that all extreme events can now be reliably attributed.

Statements 1, 3 and 4 are correct, while Statement 2 names the wrong telescope. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant in the constellation Orion, located approximately 700 light-years from Earth and one of the largest and brightest stars visible to the naked eye, the proposed explanation for its six-year brightness variation is that Betelgeuse B periodically blocks some of Betelgeuse's light during its orbital cycle, a phenomenon previously attributed to internal stellar pulsations, and the 2019-20 "Great Dimming," a dramatic short-term fading, was later confirmed to be caused by a massive dust cloud ejected from Betelgeuse's surface, a separate phenomenon from the longer six-year cycle now attributed to the companion. The companion star was actually discovered using the Very Large Telescope, operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile, not the James Webb Space Telescope, which operates in infrared and is primarily focused on distant galaxies and exoplanet atmospheres rather than this kind of nearby stellar companion detection.