Context

The second phase of the Iran–U.S. war is primarily centred on the future of the Strait of Hormuz. The earlier MoU stipulated that Iran would allow 60 days of free passage for ships through the strait and define its future administration with Oman — but subsequent talks in Doha broke down over U.S. resistance to a formal management plan, and the U.S. launched fresh air strikes on July 19.

Background & Key Facts

• What led to the war: The June 14 ceasefire MoU allowed Iran 60 days of free passage and asked it to "define the future administration and maritime services" in the strait, with Oman. Two days later, the Persian Gulf State Authority was set up by Iran to handle transit — reasserting itself as the nodal transit authority, requiring every vessel to hold a passage permit and PGSA-approved insurance, free for now but with fees reserved for later.
• The MoU unravels: The U.S. and Iranian delegations met in Switzerland on June 21; sanctions were lifted the next day, but the PGSA, already sanctioned, was never explicitly relieved — leaving shipping firms wary of dealing with it. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio then toured the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain (June 23-25), culminating in a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) meeting. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) — working with Oman — announced a temporary corridor: a southern route via Oman, alongside the northern route Iran championed. This "Omani route" was formalised.
• Tolls dispute: On June 30, U.S. and Iranian officials met in Doha. Reports said Iran and Oman had floated a plan to monetise transits — a voluntary toll modelled on the Malacca–Singapore Straits — which Washington rejected in favour of the pre-war status quo. A Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore spokesperson said the Straits of Malacca and Singapore charge no toll for transit.
• Hostilities resume: The first week of July brought the mourning period for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As the NATO summit opened in Turkey on July 7, U.S. officials restated their Hormuz position, and Trump complained European allies weren't helping keep the strait free for navigation. Iran struck three ships on the Omani route, among them the India-bound Al Rekayyat, one of the largest LNG carriers built.
• Escalation: On July 11, Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi met his Omani counterpart Badr Albusaidi in Muscat to discuss the strait, but the meeting produced no agreement. On July 13, CENTCOM said strikes on six known targets would "further degrade" the IRGC. Strikes on Greater Tunb Island (July 15) drew the same claim; nine Greek-operated LNG tankers stayed put rather than risk transit. On July 16 the Joint Maritime Information Center noted "considerable" independent judges. Iran has now turned to alternatives to the strait — targeting ship-to-ship transfers off the UAE's Fujairah pipeline and pushing the Houthis to shut off Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline route by attacking ships taking the Red Sea route.

Context

The Madhya Pradesh Cabinet approved the draft Uniform Civil Code (UCC) Bill, proposing a prohibition on practices like polygamy and nikah halala, and making registration of live-in relationships mandatory. Scheduled Tribes are exempted. The CM claimed the proposed law has support across religious communities.

Background & Key Facts

• The Bill: Drafted by a six-member committee and scheduled to be tabled in the Legislative Assembly during the Monsoon Session.
• ST exemption: The draft Bill excludes the ST communities to protect their "unique cultural heritage and traditional lifestyle". "Respecting constitutional safeguards, this law will not apply to Scheduled Tribes (such as Bhil, Gond, Korku, Baiga, Sahariya, and Bharia) covered under Articles 342 and 366 (Clause 25) of the Constitution," a government official said. Furthermore, communities whose traditional rights are protected under Part XXI of the Constitution have also been specifically exempted.
• Key provisions: Ban on polygamy and nikah halala; equal inheritance rights for daughters; a minimum age for entering a live-in relationship; and mandatory registration of marriages and divorces across all communities.
• Live-in registration: Couples must submit an application within a month of entering a live-in relationship, failing which could attract legal action. Children born of live-in relationships will be considered legitimate and entitled to full inheritance rights. If the male partner abandons the woman, she can claim maintenance — just like a legal wife — through a competent court.
• Uttarakhand precedent: Uttarakhand was the first State to implement a UCC (2024), which similarly exempted STs and made live-in registration mandatory.

Context

India has one of the world's largest youth populations (371 million as of 2025), often described as a demographic dividend. But this demographic dividend is only a promise and does not guarantee an automatic outcome: it pays off only when the transition occurs, enabling young people to move from classrooms into decent, productive work with higher skills.

Background & Key Facts

• Who Gen Z is: The term "Gen Z" refers to individuals born between 1997 and 2012. They succeeded the Millennials (Generation Y), who were born between 1988 and 1996. The working-age population for Gen Z broadly falls within the 15-26 age group.
• Unemployment: India has an estimated 29.94 crore working-age Gen Z individuals (aged 15-26 years), compared with 35 crore Millennials (aged 27-42 years). Using PLFS 2023-24 data, the overall unemployment rate for Gen Z is 11.9%, compared to only 2% among Millennials. In urban India, the situation deteriorates further, with Gen Z unemployment rising to 17.1%.
• Women worse off: For young women, it reaches a staggering 22.6% — "not merely a temporary labour-market friction; it is a serious warning sign".
• The first indicator — LFPR: Among Gen Z, 41.7% are in the labour force, against 78% of Millennials. Within Gen Z, rural participation (44.3%) exceeds urban participation (37.2%), suggesting rural youth need to enter the labour market earlier, whereas urban youth spend more time in education and training. A sharp gender divide is also evident: among young males, labour-force participation is 59.3% in rural India and 51.3% in urban India, compared to just 28% and 21.1% respectively for young females.
• The graduate trap: Among Gen Z males with graduate-level education or above, unemployment stands at 29%. Among Gen Z females, it is even higher at 36.9%. This is the heart of India's "silent jobs crisis". The country is producing educated young people faster than it is producing suitable jobs for them.
• Social-security mirage: Even for those who find work, the quality of employment remains deeply concerning. Only 20.4% of Gen Z individuals are covered by social security, and just 14.2% have a formal job contract. Among the remaining 79.9% who lack social-security coverage, only 3.2% have a job contract. Overall, only 17.3% of Gen Z workers have any form of contractual employment.

Context

Though there is no official notification yet, the Centre appears eager to initiate the delimitation exercise by amending the Constitution and passing a Delimitation Bill. In April, the Centre moved the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill and the Delimitation Bill, which in combination proposed to increase the strength of the Lok Sabha to a maximum of 850 seats.

Background & Key Facts

• The "latest Census" question: The amendment Bill was defeated in the Lok Sabha, and the Delimitation Bill was set not to vote. The question is whether, as Parliament convenes for a new session, the government can incorporate the promise of maintaining the current proportional allocation of Lok Sabha seats — a constitutional guarantee written into Articles 81 and 82 of the Constitution. That guarantee has a "sunset clause" — the existing arrangement comes to an automatic end once the data of the first Census after 2026 is published.
• The seat-freeze history: In Articles 81 and 82, there are references to three Censuses: the first Census after 2026; the Census of 1971; and the Census of 2001. The floor of Parliament and its interactions with representatives of political parties. The government has publicly maintained that its delimitation plans would not affect the existing pro-portion of individual States in the Lok Sabha, and that the proposed 50% increase in the size of the Lok Sabha would translate into a 50% increase in the number of seats in each State. The April amendments and the Delimitation Bill, in combination, proposed to remove all these separate references and the allotment of seats to the States and the delimitation of constituencies to the "latest Census".
• Two guarantees: Reserve one-third of the Lok Sabha seats for women (women's reservation), which would otherwise be published; and the delimitation Bills would not align with the oral promises made by PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah on the floor of Parliament.
• The core problem: If the Centre wants to make good on its verbal assurance of maintaining the existing proportional share of each State in the Lok Sabha, it must extend the freeze that ends in 2026 into the future. The last two times, the freeze was imposed for 25 years each — in 1976 (until 2001), and in 2001 (until 2026). The Centre plans to freeze the current arrangement for another 25 years, the references to the first Census after 2026 in Articles 81 and 82 can be amended to read "after 2051". Or it can be any other date into the future, as the case may be.
• Karti Chidambaram's caution: Congress leader Karti Chidambaram said raising the Lok Sabha strength to 815 would make the House ineffective; a larger House would widen the representation gap between northern and southern States, further marginalising the southern region.

Context

The Vikram-1 rocket, built by the Hyderabad firm Skyroot, lifted off from ISRO's First Launch Pad at Sriharikota and placed its payloads in an orbit roughly 450 km above the earth. The mission, named "Aagaman" (Sanskrit for "arrival"), made India only the third country — after the U.S. and China — whose private industry can reach orbit on its own launch vehicle.

Background & Key Facts

• 3D-printed engines: Rocket engines have traditionally been forged, machined, welded from dozens of parts. 3D printing inverts this. When Skyroot test-fired its 'Raman' engine in 2020, it said the fully printed injector halved the mass and cut components and lead time by 80% against conventional manufacturing.
• Carbon-composite body: If the engine is printed, the airframe is woven; carbon-fibre composite — filaments of near-pure carbon set in resin — offers strength per unit weight many times that of aerospace aluminium or maraging steel. Skyroot claims a five-fold saving over the best rocket steel. Every kilogram of structure trimmed is a kilogram of satellite gained.
• Four-stage design: Vikram-1 is a four-stage launcher: the first three solid-fuel stages capped by a small restartable liquid module, both conceived for small satellites on short notice. On raw capacity, ISRO wins: the SSLV (Small Satellite Launch Vehicle) lifts 500 kg to low-earth orbit against Vikram-1's 350 kg. But Vikram-1's all-carbon airframe is leaner than SSLV's conventional casings; and its production is licensed to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for ₹511 crore. Vikram-1 is venture-funded and priced by the market.
• First flight: The Vikram-1 developmental flight met almost every one of its checkpoints, including the process called 'long coast', a tricky phase for a debutant, where the rocket must hold its attitude with nothing pushing it while the printed engine burns one last time. For a maiden flight whose stated ambition was merely to clear the tower and gather data, reaching orbit is an important achievement: Electron, Firefly's Alpha, and ISRO's own SSLV all stumbled the first time.
• Frontier tech: The rocket carried five working payloads and two tablemates: EMBRACE, a robotic-arm demonstration by Cosmoserve Space aimed at grabbing space debris; the SOLARAS satellite from Grahaa Space; Skyroot's own SCOPE experimental satellite; and two deployable-technology demonstrators, uD3PP and mD3RN, from the German firm D-Orbit. Alongside flew a lab-grown diamond lotus and an 18-karat gold micro-rocket bearing rice-grain sculptures of 'Sarabhai', 'Raman', and 'Kalam'.

Context

Indian students seem to be taking the biggest hit from Canada's decision to sharply reduce the number of study permits and renewals issued to Indian students — a reversal of the steady climb of Indian students to Canada since 2015 that is likely to worsen by the end of 2026.

Background & Key Facts

• The reversal: The latest data (April 2026) showed the number of new study permits and renewals issued to Indian students saw a 16% drop compared with last April, which itself saw a striking 84% decline compared to April 2024 — an indication that a steep decline in the coming years could shrink further.
• Country share: As of 2025, Canada accounted for about 34%, or one-third of the roughly 12.54 lakh Indian students studying abroad, surpassing other key destinations like the U.S. and the U.K. (Nigeria is at 34%, U.K. 13.8%, Australia 11%, U.S. 20.3%). India overtook China in 2018 to become the single largest student sending country.
• Immigration Levels Plan: Canada's Immigration Levels Plans (ILP) slashing the annual cap on the issuance of new permits for foreign students by 50%, compared with its ILP for 2025-2027. The impact was first felt in 2025 when student permits issued to Indians in April 2025 came down to just 6,895, an 89% drop from 36,510 issued in April 2024.
• Why the cut: Canada was not only the most preferred destination for Indian students; Indians accounted for the largest share of foreign nationals studying in the country. After accounting for just 4.6% of total international students in Canada in 2015, Indians overtook the Chinese in 2018 to become the single largest student immigration group in the country.
• The driver: It is not just Indian students who are taking the hit due to Canada's shift to allow far fewer students in its bid to bring immigration back to sustainable levels, as articulated in its 2026-2028 ILP.

Context

This op-ed argues that India's booming Futures and Options (F&O) market — one of the world's largest — needs stronger entry barriers and investor protections, as retail participation surges and the vast majority of retail traders lose money.

Background & Key Facts

• The retail rush: The average investor driving this frenzy is overwhelmingly male and young (tier-2 and tier-3 cities cover 72%) earning less than ₹5 lakh per annum (75%). A July 2025 SEBI study revealed that over 90% of individual traders incurred heavy losses over the four-year period from FY22 to FY26.
• Scale of losses: Aggregate retail losses surpassed ₹2.8 lakh crore, with the average net loss per participant pegged above ₹4 lakh. Only 1% of retail traders managed a profit exceeding ₹1 lakh. Over 75% of loss-making retail traders continue to trade year after year, even after sustaining heavy losses.
• Structural imbalance: Retail traders lose because they are bringing knives to a gunfight. SEBI's research reveals that 97% of institutional profits and 96% of proprietary trading profits are generated in the Indian F&O market by algorithmic trading. These institutional desks utilise lightning-fast code co-located directly inside exchange servers.
• The regulatory response: A July 2025 SEBI interim order sought to check manipulation, highlighting how high-frequency traders can manipulate the massive layer of statutory taxes, platform fees and transaction charges applied to every click.
• Global models: For example, in Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore requires brokers to conduct a formal Customer Knowledge Assessment for exchange traded derivatives. Similarly, in the U.S., under the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's Know Your Customer and Suitability Rules, broker-dealers act as legally liable gatekeepers. Both SEBI and the Union Government have tried to cool this market. Regulators must look toward global safeguards — mature derivatives markets do not rely on warnings; they enforce strict entry barriers and suitability systems to limit speculative risks.

Context

The Centre will, in the Monsoon Session, move to grant statutory protection to the National Song Vande Mataram, in order to prohibit any per-son from intentionally preventing the singing of the National Song or causing disturbance to any assembly engaged in such singing, through the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026.

Background & Key Facts

• The amendment: The Bill seeks to amend Section 3 of the 1971 Act to include the National Song Vande Mataram, so that intentional insult of, or disturbance during, the singing of the National Song becomes a punishable offence.
• Current law: The Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 currently provides protection to the National Anthem (Jana Gana Mana) and the National Flag — but not the National Song.
• National Anthem vs Song: Jana Gana Mana is the National Anthem; Vande Mataram (from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Anandamath) is the National Song, adopted by the Constituent Assembly on January 24, 1950, with equal status to the Anthem but no prescribed protocol for its rendition.
• The provision: "Presently, there is no specific legal provision to prevent insults to the singing of the National Song or causing disturbance to any assembly engaged in such singing." The Bill fills this gap by extending the 1971 Act's protection.

Context

Unlike the AI chatbots that learn from texts, images, and videos, embodied AI must master gravity and balance, which are more difficult due to the countless physical scenarios a robot must face — the "simulation-to-real gap", where success in simulation rarely translates perfectly to the real world.

Background & Key Facts

• What "embodied" means: Embodied AI is not just "AI in a robot body". The deeper claim by experts working on this field is that a body is not a delivery mechanism for intelligence, but a part of the computation itself. In their book The Body Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard argue that the body itself is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it.
• The "simulation-to-real gap": Robots increasingly overlap in practice as a growing body of research on "embodied neuromorphic intelligence" puts spiking, event-driven chips inside physical robots specifically because their low power draw and timely response suit real-world, always-on embodied tasks. The current wave of interest is precisely about discovering how hard that distribution problem is at scale.
• Neuromorphic AI: Neuromorphic AI is about how the processor itself is built — a hardware and algorithm paradigm that tries to mimic the physical mechanics of biological neurons, most commonly through spiking neural networks (SNNs). SNNs operate through discrete spikes: each neuron integrates incoming signals and fires only when a threshold is exceeded, which makes them well suited to time-sensitive tasks like motion sensing.
• Where evolution comes in: If bodies do computational work, an obvious question follows: how do you design the right body for the task, instead of bolting an AI model onto whatever frame engineers have built? Evolutionary methods of the kind Mr. Jin champions add another angle to that effort — instead of only improving how a fixed body learns, they ask whether a different form factor would make the problem easier to solve in the first place.
• Real deployment: The field's central bottleneck: robot bodies are frequently mismatched to the tasks and environments they end up in, and manually re-engineering hardware every time a task changes is slow and expensive. Evolutionary methods offer a way to search body-and-brain design space automatically, letting simulated populations of robotic forms compete and replicate based on task performance before anything is built.

Context

In May 2026, the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) introduced Electronic Gold Receipts (EGRs), a new exchange-traded segment for buying and selling gold in electronic form — offering the convenience of electronic investing along with ownership of physical gold.

Background & Key Facts

• What EGRs are: Electronic Gold Receipts are exchange-traded securities representing ownership of physical gold (specified purity) stored in SEBI-regulated vaults. They can be held electronically in a demat account, bought and sold in different denominations on the bourse and converted into physical gold via pre-scribed process.
• The framework: On September 28, 2021, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) introduced the framework for Gold Exchange under the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, 1956. In November 2021, SEBI issued a 'Comprehensive Risk Management Framework' for EGRs. In September 2022, the BSE launched its EGR segment; NSE followed in May 2026.
• Purity standards: The EGRs are available in two purity standards: 999 (99.9% pure gold) and 995 (99.5% pure gold). Investors have six different denominations such as 10 mg, 100 mg, 1 g, 10 g, 100 g and 1 kg. Investors can accumulate over time, and EGRs offer denominations as low as 10 grams.
• Benefits: EGRs combine the advantages of physical gold with the convenience of electronic investing. As a SEBI-recognised security, each EGR is backed by a specified quantity of gold of a defined purity, securely stored in SEBI-regulated vaults. This offers a transparent and standardised way to own gold while removing concerns over purity and percentage storage. They offer liquidity, settlement guarantee, fungibility and can help diversify investment portfolios.
• Costs: Apart from the cost of purchasing EGRs, investors may also incur brokerage, demat (depository) and vault-storage charges and other applicable transaction charges. Those opting for physical delivery of gold may also have to bear purity testing and transportation charges.

Context

President Droupadi Murmu embarked on a three-nation Europe tour to Moldova, North Macedonia, and Romania to deepen India's ties with these European countries across a range of sectors — including trade and technology, and to boost people-to-people ties.

Background & Key Facts

• Significance: The visit begins with a visit to Moldova on Monday — the first-ever visit by an Indian President to the eastern European nation. The visit to Romania is taking place after a gap of over three decades.
• Regional context: Moldova (a candidate for EU membership, bordering Ukraine) and the western-Balkan states of North Macedonia and Romania are of strategic interest amid the Russia-Ukraine war and India's broader outreach to Europe.
• The objective: To deepen ties across trade, technology, connectivity, education, and people-to-people links — part of India's diversified European engagement complementing the India-EU FTA talks and the recently operationalised India-UK CETA.

Context

The Supreme Court reasoned that the use of four-letter expletive and its variations may be "abusive, unpalatable or uncivil", but does not qualify as "obscene" in law — distinguishing incivility from legal obscenity under Section 294(b) of the Indian Penal Code (obscene acts and songs).

Background & Key Facts

• The reasoning: "Use of mere swear words, profanities and vulgar expletives, however distasteful or uncivil they may be, cannot be equated with obscenity… Words which are merely vulgar or abusive may evoke a feeling of disgust, revulsion, or shock, but that by itself does not make them obscene in law," the court said.
• The test: The "community standards test" — that is, the terms used must be lascivious, should appeal to prurient interests of people, and provoke sexual thoughts among the persons who are likely to see, hear, or read them. The court found nothing on record to show that the appellants' verbal outrage passed the test.
• Dictionary definitions: Justice Karol turned to dictionaries — Collins and Cambridge — to explore the definitions of words such as "abusive" and "vulgar" in his judgment.
• The case: A Bench headed by Justice Sanjay Karol came in a bail dispute case between neighbours in Tamil Nadu. During an altercation in 2017, one of them repeatedly flung four-letter abuse; the court said this "would require passing the 'community standards' test" — mere vulgarity did not amount to obscenity.