Current affairs — 8 September 2026

Prelims pointers

• The Indian Space Policy cited by the editorial dates to April 2023 and envisages a changing division between ISRO and commercial industry.
• Nine ISRO employee associations jointly sought clarity from the chairman on staff strength, recruitment and outsourcing of core functions.
• IN-SPACe was established to facilitate private participation and said ISRO would not be diminished as industry’s role expands.
• EOS-05 is described as ISRO’s first geosynchronous imaging satellite and was launched on a GSLV.
• The editorial cites NASA’s budget as $24.4 billion and the Department of Space’s budget as ₹13,705 crore.

Prelims pointers

• The UN world map discussed in the report was published on July 1, 2026.
• In Arunachal Pradesh, the map labels the border with Assam as the “Chinese Line” and the border with China’s Tibet as the “Indian Line”.
• The map labels Aksai Chin’s eastern boundary as the “Indian Line” and uses a “Chinese line” between Ladakh and Aksai Chin.
• A dotted line is used for the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, accompanied by a note on its approximate and unsettled status.
• India said its support for the non-binding resolution concerned equal-area cartographic representation, not endorsement of a specific boundary depiction.

Prelims pointers

• UPSC recommended 958 candidates in the 2025 Civil Services Examination, but their service allocation and foundation course remained pending.
• The Centre asked the Supreme Court to permit service allocation without applying the March 11 Rohith Nathan judgment to the batch.
• The judgment found that some OBC candidates were wrongly excluded by relying only on their parents’ salary income for creamy-layer classification.
• The CSE 2025 results were declared on March 6, a few days before the Rohith Nathan judgment.
• The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear the Centre’s application on September 17.

Prelims pointers

• TRISHNA expands to Thermal Infra-Red Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural Resource Assessment.
• TRISHNA is a jointly developed ISRO-CNES mission scheduled to be launched by the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle next year.
• CNES is developing TRISHNA’s Thermal Infra-Red payload, while ISRO is developing its VNIR-SWIR payload.
• TRISHNA will monitor surface temperature, emissivity, and biophysical and radiation variables for surface-energy budgeting.
• The mission links Earth observation to water and food security and water management through evapotranspiration monitoring.

Prelims pointers

• HM Treasury included India’s CCTS in an indicative list of overseas carbon-pricing schemes assessed as qualifying under U.K. CBAM regulations for 2026.
• India’s CCTS seeks to reduce, remove or avoid greenhouse-gas emissions by pricing them through tradable Carbon Credit Certificates.
• The Bureau of Energy Efficiency is to fund CCTS implementation from fees and charges collected from scheme entities and from its own resources.
• U.K. CBAM relief for eligible Indian goods depends on their effective CCTS carbon price and compliance with evidence and verification requirements.
• The report places India-U.K. merchandise trade at $25.1 billion in 2025-26 and bilateral services trade at $35.4 billion in 2024.

Prelims pointers

• Space reforms begun in 2020 assign IN-SPACe the role of authorising participation by non-government entities.
• NewSpace India Limited commercialises mature space capabilities while industry is expected to manufacture and scale mature systems.
• The ISRO-led national space ecosystem is institutionalised through the Indian Space Policy 2023.
• ISRO is to focus on advanced R&D, scientific and strategic missions, and infrastructure too complex for private developers.
• India has more than 450 space start-ups and aims to grow its roughly $8.4-billion space economy to $44 billion by 2033.

Prelims pointers

• Indonesia’s volcanology agency counts 500 volcanoes in the country, of which 127 are active.
• The agency closely monitors 69 active volcanoes through a network of 74 observation points.
• Five volcanoes were at the second-highest alert status: Anak Krakatau, Lewotobi Laki-laki, Merapi, Semeru and Sinabung.
• Anak Krakatau’s recent ash plume reached 50,000 feet and spread as far as 400 km on one side, reaching Jakarta about 150 km away.
• Krakatau’s 1883 eruptions triggered tsunamis that killed more than 36,000 people; an Anak Krakatau eruption caused a tsunami in 2018 that killed over 400.

Prelims pointers

• The International Space Summit is scheduled for September 9–10, 2026 in Paris, France.
• Around 2,000 participants from 120 countries, including a high-level Indian delegation, are expected at the summit.
• The summit’s four pillars are defence and security, space economy, space regulation, and space and scientific research.
• IRIS² expands to Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity, and Security by Satellite and is intended for secure communication.
• Three summit declarations concerning international safety, frequency, and space data are likely to be adopted.

Prelims pointers

• The Tibetan Plateau’s glacier area has fallen to about 39,000 sq km from 44,000 sq km and 51,000 sq km in two earlier inventories over six decades.
• Glaciers in the Gangdise, Nyenchen Tanglha and Himalayan areas of the southern plateau have shrunk by about 40 percent over the past 60 years.
• Across the entire Tibetan Plateau, glaciers have shrunk by 24%, with global warming identified as the main driver.
• More than 14,000 glacial lakes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau cover a combined area exceeding 1,100 sq km.
• Glacial-lake area near China’s southern borders is expanding by an average of 1% annually, raising downstream concerns for India and Nepal.

Prelims pointers

• The 2022 gazette notification identified nine wildlife corridors connecting Kaziranga National Park with the hills of Karbi Anglong district.
• The Karbi Anglong hills provide refuge to animals from Kaziranga National Park when the park is flooded.
• The nine corridors are Amguri, Bagori, Chirang, Deosur, Haldhibari, Harmati, Hatidandi, Kanchanjuri and Panbari.
• The corridor committee was constituted on May 4, 2019, submitted its report on August 28, 2019, and the gazette notification was issued on April 1, 2022.
• The online notification named all nine corridors initially but contained detailed descriptions and maps for only eight, with Panbari omitted.

Prelims pointers

• Soft corals depend on internal fluid pressure to remain upright, unlike hard corals supported by rigid calcium carbonate skeletons.
• Environmental changes can disrupt a soft coral’s internal fluid pressure and cause the coral to slump or collapse.
• The Paran Ocean Citizen Science Centre monitors soft corals around uninhabited islets south of Jeju island.
• Kim Taihun and Anna Beate Jöst documented Jeju’s 2024 soft-coral slumping event in a May article in Scientific Reports.
• High water temperatures, typhoons, heavy rain, and Yangtze River water altering salinity are identified as possible slumping triggers.

Prelims pointers

• Flue gas desulphurisation systems are installed at coal-fired power plants to reduce sulphur-dioxide emissions under environmental regulations.
• Category ‘A’ thermal power plants are located within 10 km of the National Capital Region or cities having a million-plus population.
• The Supreme Court Bench comprised Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana.
• The petitioner linked the FGD requirement to a Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change notification issued in December 2015.
• The Supreme Court requested the NGT to hear the interim-relief plea on priority but made clear that it had not examined the petition’s merits.

Prelims pointers

• JCRA upgraded India’s sovereign credit rating from ‘BBB+’ to ‘A-’, the country’s first ‘A’ grade in more than 35 years.
• A sovereign credit rating assesses a country’s ability and willingness to repay debt and captures default and lending risk.
• JCRA based its India upgrade on foreign-currency long-term debt and local-currency long-term debt.
• JCRA cited relatively high growth, growth-oriented government policies, and improved strength of India’s financial system.
• Morningstar DBRS, S&P, and R&I upgraded India in May, August, and September 2025 respectively before JCRA’s action.

Prelims pointers

• President Mohamed Muizzu invited British Prime Minister Andrew Burnham for talks on the disputed Chagos Islands on September 8, 2026.
• Britain signed a May 2025 agreement with Mauritius to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands.
• The U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia air base is located in the Chagos Islands and was cited as vital to British security.
• The British government put the sovereignty-transfer deal on hold in April 2026 and shelved the required legislation.
• Maldives calls the archipelago Foalhavahi and bases its claim on historical and cultural ties between Maldives and Chagos.

Prelims pointers

• Odisha’s Forest Department rescued five orangutans from the Udayapur-Talsari forest area of Balasore district on September 8, 2026.
• The rescued group consisted of three males and two females, aged between six months and one year.
• Orangutans occur naturally in the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia and are not native to India.
• The animals were shifted to Nandankanan Zoological Park for medical examination, and officials said they appeared uninjured.
• Officials said a case would be registered under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, while a team investigated the suspected transit operation.

Prelims pointers

• CWMA upheld CWRC’s direction that Karnataka ensure a flow of 6,000 cusecs daily to Tamil Nadu for 15 days.
• The directed flow begins at 8 a.m. on September 9 at the Biligundlu inter-State gauge and totals approximately 7.8 tmcft.
• Karnataka cited 101 drought-hit taluks, including 40 in the Cauvery basin, and critically inadequate storage in four basin reservoirs.
• Karnataka alleged Tamil Nadu’s Kuruvai area was about 8.41 lakh acres against 1.85 lakh acres permitted by the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal.
• Tamil Nadu sought 1.76 tmcft, or 20,370 cusecs, per day for 15 days, saying delayed releases would affect Samba cultivation and delta livelihoods.

Prelims pointers

• For 2024-25, the CAG found that ₹9,222 crore in cess and levy collections was not transferred to four designated reserve funds.
• The non-transfer finding appears in Paragraph 3.3.1 of the Comptroller and Auditor General's Report No. 6 of 2026.
• The Union government collected ₹3,89,220 crore through cesses, charges and levies in 2024-25, equal to 10.25% of gross tax revenue.
• Only ₹14,439 crore was transferred to the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Nidhi against ₹21,085 crore collected, leaving a ₹6,646 crore gap.
• The Finance Ministry said transfers to three designated funds were ₹86,020 crore against ₹84,339 crore collected, yielding a net excess transfer of ₹1,681 crore.

Prelims pointers

• A Cancer Gap Care Analysis at Vidisha was conducted by a multidisciplinary Tata Memorial Centre team from June 5 to 7, 2026.
• A two-day screening programme in Vidisha identified 586 cancer patients and 254 suspected cases for further treatment or referral.
• Two doctors and seven nursing officers from Vidisha completed dedicated oncology training at ACTREC, Mumbai.
• The Vidisha programme provides for both a Population-Based Cancer Registry and a Hospital-Based Cancer Registry.
• Tata Memorial Centre has 11 institutional units across seven States, while the National Cancer Grid connects more than 380 organisations and centres.

Prelims pointers

• MoES and NIOT held the deep-sea-mining workshop in New Delhi with EY as knowledge partner and NITI Aayog associated with the event.
• The release identifies nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese as critical minerals needed by clean energy, advanced manufacturing, high computing and electric mobility.
• India has an exclusive ISA exploration contract over 75,000 sq km in the Central Indian Ocean Basin, estimated to contain roughly 366–380 million tonnes of polymetallic nodules.
• India is described as the first country to hold two exploration contracts for polymetallic sulphides, including the recent Carlsberg Ridge agreement.
• Under the ₹4,077-crore Deep Ocean Mission, NIOT demonstrated indigenous deep-sea mining crawler systems at depths exceeding 5,000 metres in the Indian Ocean.

Prelims pointers

• More than 24 billion UPI transactions were recorded in August, according to the figures cited at Global Fintech Fest 2026.
• The PIB release states that UPI is live in 11 countries and cites existing cross-border payment-system connectivity with Singapore.
• PM SVANidhi brought millions of street vendors into the formal credit system and raised their average annual income by over 20 per cent.
• The government extended PM SVANidhi until 2030, while the release identified UPI as a major catalyst for the scheme's success.
• The fintech sector was asked to focus on cybersecurity, ethical data protection, regulator-industry innovation and a consumer-protection index.

Prelims pointers

• The completed Eastern and Western Dedicated Freight Corridors together extend for 2,800 kilometres and carry over 430 cargo trains daily.
• The release says a freight movement taking 30 hours by truck can take 10–12 hours on the corridor, with lower fuel use and freight charges.
• A double-stack container train from JNPT Port to Vadodara transported cargo equivalent to more than 250 trucks in one journey.
• Since 2014, India has produced 50,000 modern railway coaches and introduced nearly 2.5 lakh wagons into the rail network.
• PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana has enabled 55 lakh families nationwide, including 11 lakh in Gujarat, to become electricity producers.

Prelims pointers

• Mithun is identified as Bos frontalis, called the “Cattle of the Hills,” and is important to tribal livelihoods and food security in Northeast India.
• Researchers installed 12 high-definition CCTV cameras across two sheds, with continuous day-night surveillance and infrared coverage.
• The dataset contained 3,000 manually annotated images of four behaviours: feeding, standing, lying and mounting.
• The framework combines YOLOv8n for behaviour detection with DeepSORT for tracking animals across frames and assigning persistent identities.
• YOLOv8n achieved 99.5 per cent mAP@0.5 and 99.6 per cent recall, while processing about 31 frames per second on an NVIDIA RTX 3060.

Prelims pointers

• Total kharif area reported on September 4, 2026 was 1,086.31 lakh hectares, 17.69 lakh hectares below the corresponding 2025-26 level.
• Rice area was 421.82 lakh hectares, a year-on-year decrease of 16.37 lakh hectares.
• Pulses covered 117.13 lakh hectares, 1.84 lakh hectares more than in the corresponding period of the previous year.
• Shri Anna and coarse cereals covered 181.39 lakh hectares, while oilseeds covered 191.99 lakh hectares.
• Jute and mesta coverage rose by 0.10 lakh hectares to 6.34 lakh hectares.

Prelims pointers

• The Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs prepared the Comprehensive CSR Framework for Indian Coal Companies.
• The framework was described as the first sector-specific CSR framework since statutory CSR began under the Companies Act, 2013.
• Thalassemia Bal Sewa Yojana provides up to ₹10 lakh per patient directly to empanelled hospitals for bone-marrow transplantation.
• The TBSY hospital network expanded from four to 21 empanelled hospitals and completed more than 1,050 transplants.
• Nanha Sa Dil has screened over two lakh children and completed more than 1,500 free corrective cardiac surgeries.

Prelims pointers

• The ₹37,500 crore surface coal and lignite gasification scheme received seven applications in its first round.
• The Union Cabinet approved the scheme on May 13, 2026, and the Request for Proposal was issued on July 7, 2026.
• The scheme supports conversion of domestic coal and lignite into syngas, methanol, ammonia, urea and hydrogen.
• It targets 75 million tonnes of capacity within the national objective of 100 million tonnes of coal gasification capacity by 2030.
• Eight projects are already under implementation under the earlier ₹8,500 crore Financial Incentive Scheme approved in January 2024.

Prelims pointers

• DoT launched the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator on May 22, 2025 under its Digital Intelligence Platform.
• FRI classifies mobile numbers as Medium, High or Very High risk according to their likely involvement in financial fraud.
• Cumulative suspected fraud losses prevented through FRI reached ₹5,043.73 crore by August 2026.
• FRI draws on Sanchar Saathi reports, the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal and intelligence from telecom and financial entities.
• The Digital Intelligence Platform was launched in 2024 and enables real-time collaboration among more than 1,600 stakeholders.

Prelims pointers

• The inaugural India-Morocco Joint Defence Committee meeting was held in New Delhi on September 8, 2026.
• Talks covered training and education, peacekeeping, military exercises, medical cooperation, cyber defence and defence industries.
• The meeting was co-chaired by Amitabh Prasad and Brigadier General Abdellah Athmani of the Moroccan Royal Armed Forces.
• The Moroccan delegation visited India from September 7 to 10, 2026, and interacted with defence industries at DPSU Bhawan in New Delhi.
• The Joint Defence Committee is an institutional mechanism under the defence-cooperation MoU signed during Rajnath Singh’s Morocco visit in September 2025.

Prelims pointers

• Veer Guardian-2026 is a bilateral exercise of the Indian Air Force and Japan Air Self Defence Force at Air Force Station Jodhpur.
• The exercise is scheduled from September 9 to 22, 2026, and the release describes it as a fourteen-day programme.
• The IAF aircraft mix includes the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft Tejas, Su-30 MKI and Rafale.
• The Japan Air Self Defence Force will participate in Veer Guardian-2026 with its F-2A fighter aircraft.
• Activities include advanced operational missions, mission-planning conferences, expert exchanges, and interactions on engineering and aerospace safety.

Prelims pointers

• IAF Dronathon-2026 is intended to let domestic manufacturers demonstrate advances in Unmanned Aerial Systems and Counter Unmanned Aerial Systems.
• The event is scheduled at the Pokhran range in Jaisalmer from September 14 to 16, 2026.
• Dronathon-2026 includes both static displays and live operational demonstrations of drone and counter-drone technologies.
• Its key focus areas are surveillance and reconnaissance, autonomous operations, swarm technologies and electronic warfare.
• Aligned with Atmanirbhar Bharat, the event seeks to strengthen the indigenous defence ecosystem by integrating industry experts, start-ups and innovators.

Prelims pointers

• Software Technology Parks of India is a science and technology organisation under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
• The Open Challenge Programme of STPI Electropreneur Park seeks to identify and support innovative technology solutions and startups in the ESDM domain.
• AIC STPINEXT INITIATIVES exchanged MoUs with regional Spoke Centre partners and with Indian Angel Network Services Private Limited and Solara VC.
• The release credits EP 1.0 with nurturing 59 startups, filing 66 patents and creating more than ₹640 crore in startup valuation.
• Electropreneur Park 2.0 targets 500 startups and seeks to extend ESDM incubation into Tier-II and Tier-III cities.

Prelims pointers

• The seventh India-Japan Joint Working Group meeting on cooperation in forests was held in Bengaluru on September 8, 2026.
• The three discussion areas were Tree Outside Forests, forest genetics and the Forest Stack.
• Forest Stack discussions covered forest inventory, forest stock assessment, and geospatial and monitoring technologies.
• India and Japan endorsed a 2027–2031 roadmap under the Memorandum of Cooperation on forests signed in 2015.
• The programme included Bengaluru's Institute of Wood Science and Technology and planned visits to sandalwood facilities in Mysuru and Nagarhole Tiger Reserve.

Prelims pointers

• India reported an increase in medical colleges from 387 in 2014 to 858, a rise of 121.71 per cent.
• MBBS seats rose from 51,348 to 1,42,464 and postgraduate medical seats from 31,185 to 86,287 since 2014.
• The government is establishing 157 nursing colleges co-located with medical colleges, expected to add about 15,700 nursing graduates each year.
• The National Commission established in 2024 brings 57 allied and healthcare professions into a structured regulatory framework under the 2021 Act.
• The Dili Declaration seeks greater equity in specialised care through workforce measures, integrated referrals, teleconsultation and regional cooperation.

Prelims pointers

• The new link is the first road bridge across the shared border between Russia and North Korea.
• The bridge crosses the Tumen River, which runs along North Korea's borders with Russia and China.
• The road bridge is one kilometre long, has two lanes and can carry up to 300 vehicles per day.
• Russia and North Korea agreed in 2024 to build an automobile bridge over the Tumen River, and construction began last year.
• Before the road bridge opened, Russia and North Korea were already connected by a railway bridge and air service.