CDS Weekly Current Affairs Quiz: 12–18 October 2026

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.

The Ministry of Defence has said that the 25th Meeting of the Council of Heads of Government of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation takes place in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, on 19 and 20 October 2026, and that Defence Minister Rajnath Singh travels there to speak for India.

The Ministry of Defence said an aircraft of this type undertook the evacuation, lifting a critically ill civilian patient out of Leh late at night and landing at Palam, from where the patient was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

INS Sudarshini belongs to the Indian Navy and is rigged with three masts, and her role is to train officers and sailors at sea rather than to fight.

The correct answer is NAFED, the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Limited, which will supply the rice during the financial year 2026-27 after it is milled to prescribed defence specifications and cleared by quality-control checks.

IBSAMAR has been held once in two years since that year, under the India-Brazil-South Africa framework, and has become a settled platform for joint training and for sharing operational practices among the three navies.

INS Mangrol, with pennant number P82, is the third Anti-Submarine Warfare Shallow Water Craft of that class to enter service with the Indian Navy.

The correct answer is the India-Czech Joint Defence Committee, named in the talks as the mechanism through which the two sides would take their defence industrial engagement further.

Samarthak is the first of four Multi-Purpose Vessels that are joining the Indian Navy, which means three more ships of the same class will be delivered after her.

At the first BIMSTEC Home Ministers Meeting the Union Home Minister said the proposed BIMSTEC Disaster Management Centre is planned at Jamnagar, which lies in Gujarat, and he asked member countries to take an active part in making the centre work.

At the forum the Defence Minister placed MAHASAGAR alongside SAGAR, which expands to Security and Growth for All in the Region, and said both, together with the Act East policy, argue for open and multipolar cooperation channelled through ASEAN-led mechanisms that sit at the centre of India’s Indo-Pacific vision.

The Combined Maritime Forces is a partnership of 47 nations, and CTF 154 is the one task force within it that is given over wholly to training, running professional courses and capacity building so that member navies can work with one another at sea.

The salt was shipped through Colombo Port in Sri Lanka and then sent on to India, a third-country route meant to break the visible link with Pakistan.