CDS Current Affairs Quiz: October 2026

Varuna is the annual bilateral maritime exercise between the Indian Navy and the French Navy, and in its twenty-fourth edition the Indian warship Trishul sailed to the French port of Toulon to take part.

That is how the ship has been described in the announcement of her visit to the Kenyan port, and a frigate of this class is a general purpose warship built with a reduced radar signature so that it is harder to detect at sea.

HQ IDS was established in New Delhi on that date, and the day is observed every year as Tri-Service Day; the organisation therefore completed 25 years and celebrated its Silver Jubilee under the theme of future readiness through jointness and integration.

The Raksha Mantri launched the department’s publications and digital initiatives at this celebration held at DRDO Bhawan in New Delhi, and he congratulated the department on nearly three centuries of service to the nation, which fits an edition in the high two hundreds.

Ankush won the gold medal in the men's 80 kg boxing event at the Asian Games with an emphatic victory in the final, and the weight division is the detail that decides this question.

The second edition of the Naval Commanders' Conference 2026 was conducted in New Delhi over three days, from 29 September to 1 October 2026, and it was at this apex-level sitting that the Navy's operational and materiel preparedness was reviewed.

The Assembly and the meetings held around it are taking place at Arusha, a city in that country, from 5 to 9 October 2026, and the Indian Parliamentary Delegation left for Arusha for this purpose.

That is the span over which the country's first free-space Quantum Key Distribution link was established, between the BISAG-N campus and IIT Gandhinagar, in a field trial run on the night of 27 and 28 September.

The ASEAN-India Maritime Exercise was conducted there, with INS Sahyadri and INS Kulish representing the Indian Navy through both the Harbour Phase and the Sea Phase.

The Ministry of Defence announced that the India–UAE joint military exercise Mountain Guardian 2026 began at the Foreign Training Node in Chaubatia, Uttarakhand, with equal participation from both armies and mountain warfare as the theme.

The yard is building all five Fleet Support Ships ordered by the Indian Navy, and FSS-1 will be launched there on 6 October 2026 into the waters of the Bay of Bengal, eighteen months after its steel was first cut.

The two-thousandth engine from this plant is being handed over on 6 October 2026, with the Raksha Mantri inaugurating the event and the Chief Minister of Odisha among those attending.

The Ministry of Defence signed the contract with BrahMos Aerospace Private Limited on 6 October 2026 in New Delhi, and the value of the order for BrahMos Fire Control Systems and launchers meant for ships of the Indian Navy was fixed at Rs 661.50 crore.

The release states that this laboratory is designing and developing the High-Altitude Platform, a lighter-than-air system meant to work as a long endurance stratospheric aerial surveillance platform.

The Defence Minister was present at Koraput for this handover, which came six decades after the Division was set up in 1964.

The Government has appointed Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit, PVSM, AVSM, VM, VSM, as the twenty-ninth officer to head the Indian Air Force, and he takes charge in the rank of Air Chief Marshal from the afternoon of 31 October 2026.

Mt Kamet stands in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand and is the third-highest mountain within India, which places exactly those two peaks above it.

The exercise is being held off the Paradip coast of Odisha and is inaugurated by the Minister of State for Defence, with the search and rescue demonstration at sea following a day later.

The Fleet Support Ships are under construction at HSL in Visakhapatnam, and FSS-1, the first of the class, was launched there on 6 October 2026 with Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh as chief guest.

The exercise was inaugurated by the Raksha Rajya Mantri on 7 October 2026 and the sea phase was set to be conducted off Paradip, on the Odisha coast, the next day.

The waiver of proof and testing charges for this set of projects is the central financial relief in the revised Standard Operating Procedure, and the stated reason is the promotion of self-reliance in defence.

The Indian Coast Guard conducted the 12th edition of the National Maritime Search and Rescue Exercise in the sea off Paradip on 8 October 2026, and the Paradip Port Authority along with the Odisha state administration took part in it.

The force completed 94 years of service on 8 October 2026 and held its ceremonial Air Force Day parade at Hindan, where the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal AP Singh, reviewed the parade in the presence of the Army and Navy chiefs, former air chiefs and other…

He is also Secretary of the Department of Military Affairs, and he opened the new housing for senior sailors and naval defence civilians, along with trunk utility and amenity infrastructure, at the Karwar base.

Speaking at the eighth annual session of the Society of Indian Defence Manufacturers in New Delhi, the Defence Minister said exports of defence goods had touched this figure in the financial year 2025-26, the highest India has ever reached, and that the rise over the preceding year was more than…

Tarang Shakti is an air exercise, and the second edition was hosted by the Indian Air Force from 26 September to 12 October 2026, with the Defence Minister addressing the participants at Air Force Station Jodhpur.

The mela, named Sainya Sampark Mela - Sadaiv Aapke Saath, was held at Deoghar and was organised by the Indian Army together with the Deoghar district administration.

The Ministry of Defence has said that the Defence Secretary, Rajesh Kumar Singh, will undertake an official visit to these two countries from 12 to 15 October 2026, with the Cyprus leg falling on 12 and 13 October and Greece forming the second half of the tour.

The correct answer is Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers, Kolkata, where Shreyas, carrying the yard number 3040, was launched.

The Defence Correspondents Course ended there once the participating journalists had completed the Navy, Air Force and Army legs of the programme, and the valedictory function was held at the same place.

The Ministry of Defence stated that the guided missile stealth frigate INS Trishul had reached Plymouth in the United Kingdom, where it is scheduled to exercise with the Royal Navy in KONKAN-26.

INDRA is the bilateral exercise between India and Russia, and in this edition the Indian Navy works with the Russian Federation Navy.

The MoU signed alongside the launch of Bharat Rice gives the Army a formal framework to use identified FCI warehouses, labour resources and material-handling equipment when operations require them, and it holds for five years with the option of extension by mutual consent.

INS Tarkash, a frontline guided missile stealth frigate of the Indian Navy, has been sent on an overseas deployment to South Africa to join the ninth edition of the India-Brazil-South Africa Maritime Exercise.

The ship was designed in India and constructed by that yard, and it carries more than 80 per cent indigenous content, which the Navy cites as evidence of India's own strength in warship design, construction and systems integration.

Rajnath Singh met Karel Havlicek, who is the First Deputy Prime Minister as well as the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, in New Delhi, and the two reviewed the entire range of defence industrial cooperation between their countries.

Samarthak is to be commissioned at Naval Base, Karwar, and the ceremony has been fixed for 16 October 2026. Karwar lies on the Karnataka coast and hosts the base from which the Navy is conducting this induction.

The first meeting of BIMSTEC Home Ministers, hosted by India in New Delhi and chaired by Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah, adopted this declaration, which lays down the principles behind security cooperation in the grouping.

The maiden ASEAN-India Defence Think Tank Forum was convened at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, where Raksha Mantri Rajnath Singh addressed delegates from India and all eleven ASEAN member states across a two-day programme.

The ceremony at which the Indian Navy gave up command of Combined Task Force 154 was held at Manama in Bahrain on 14 October 2026, and it closed the first spell in which India headed a task force of the Combined Maritime Forces.

DRI ran Operation Deep Manifest and detected 295 containers carrying 7,311 metric tonnes of Pakistan-origin industrial or Himalayan rock salt, worth roughly Rs 30 crore, that had been brought into the country in breach of the import ban.

The campaign was launched by the Defence Minister in New Delhi and is the largest fundraising effort ever undertaken by any Indian Institute of Technology.

Speaking at a Defence Conclave in New Delhi, Raksha Mantri Shri Rajnath Singh described the security landscape of the digital age as hybrid, high-tech and hyper warfare, and listed a 5D Security Threat made up of disinformation, destabilisation, disruption, deception and destruction.

The Bengaluru-based company signed a contract worth Rs 2,563 crore with the Ministry of Defence on 15 October 2026 for GSAT-7C, a dedicated communication satellite for the Indian Air Force.

The 14th High Level Meeting between the Indian Coast Guard and the Korea Coast Guard was held in that Korean port city on 14 October 2026, during an official visit by the Indian delegation to the Republic of Korea that ran from 13 to 16 October 2026.

The vessel was commissioned by Vice-President C. P. Radhakrishnan at Karwar in Karnataka and is described as the Indian Navy's first indigenous Multi-Purpose Vessel, with more than 75 per cent of its content made in India.

The Technology Development Board, which functions under the Department of Science and Technology, signed the agreement with this Karnataka-based company for financial support from the Research Development and Innovation Fund.

The fourteenth meeting of the Joint Working Group between the defence ministries of India and Mongolia took place in Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, on 16 October 2026, where the two delegations reviewed their running defence cooperation activities and identified new areas to work in.

Port Victoria is the port where the ships of the First Training Squadron stayed during their training deployment, arriving on the twelfth of October and sailing out on the fifteenth.

KONKAN is the bilateral maritime exercise held between the Indian Navy and the Royal Navy, and the edition named KONKAN-26 concluded off Plymouth in the United Kingdom.