NDA Current Affairs Quiz: 9 October 2026

The correct answer is General NS Raja Subramani, Chief of Defence Staff. 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. Option A is wrong because the Chief of the Naval Staff is not named in connection with this inauguration at all. Option C is wrong because the Defence Minister did not perform the ceremony; the announcement came from the Ministry of Defence, but the inauguration was done by the Chief of Defence Staff. Option D names an officer who was indeed present, Vice Admiral Vivek Dahiya, the Director General Seabird, but he attended the ceremony along with other senior officers rather than inaugurating the facilities. Candidates should link Project Seabird with Karwar and with the Chief of Defence Staff for this event.

The correct answer is the Department of Telecommunications and the International Telecommunication Union. The workshop was organised jointly by the department, which sits in the Ministry of Communications, and the Union, and was inaugurated by Jyotiraditya M. Scindia at India Mobile Congress 2026 in New Delhi. Options A, C and D are wrong because none of those pairings is named as the organiser; they are offered as plausible combinations of Indian bodies and international agencies. Dr Bilel Jamoussi, Deputy Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau of the Union, and Amit Agrawal, Secretary of the Department of Telecommunications, were among those present. The minister described the Lab’s move from Geneva to New Delhi as mirroring the path artificial intelligence must take from global talk to local solutions.

The correct answer is ₹38,424 crore. 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 60 per cent. Option A is wrong because no such figure was given for the year in question. Option C is wrong as well; it sits between the achieved figure and the target but matches neither. Option D is wrong because it crosses the goal the minister himself described as still ahead, namely ₹50,000 crore of defence exports by the year 2029. Aspirants should hold on to three linked numbers from this event: the achievement of ₹38,424 crore, the growth of over 60 per cent, and the target of ₹50,000 crore by 2029.

The correct answer is Cochin Shipyard Limited, Kochi. Mangrol is the third shallow water craft for anti-submarine warfare delivered by that yard, and it will be commissioned at Naval Dockyard, Mumbai, with the Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Western Naval Command presiding. Options A, B and D name other Indian defence shipyards, each of which builds warships for the Navy, but none of them built this craft. Candidates should connect the builder with two other facts from the same announcement: the ship has more than 80 per cent indigenous content, and it was constructed under the Make in India and Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiatives. Note also that the commissioning port, Mumbai, is different from the yard that built the ship, a distinction examiners like to test.

The correct answer is about 10,000. The base at Karwar, when the work is finished, will house roughly 10,000 uniformed and civilian personnel together with their families, and the Ministry expects this to strengthen the local economy, industry and tourism and to generate direct and indirect jobs across the Uttara Kannada region. Options A, B and D give figures that do not match the strength stated for the base; they are plausible only because large naval stations vary widely in size. Remember the related numbers from the same handover, since paper setters mix them up: two towers of 60 dwelling units each, one for married senior sailors and one for naval defence civilians, inliving accommodation for 156 Defence Security Corps personnel, and one kindergarten school, all at East of Manzil Creek and Amadalli inside the base.

The correct answer is AI Export Promotion, which is not a pillar of the framework. The three interconnected pillars are AI Readiness and Policy, which assesses policy gaps and sets up practical governance frameworks; AI Skills Development, which scales national talent through capacity building and training; and Public AI Infrastructure, which creates standards-based, interoperable sandbox environments for testing, validating, scaling and reusing locally relevant solutions. Options A, B and C are therefore wrong answers to a question asking what is not included. The framework is meant to help countries overcome limited skills, fragmented innovation and missing infrastructure, and India is one of ten pilot countries, alongside partners from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Gulf, bringing its model of shared compute, open datasets and Digital Public Infrastructure.

The correct answer is 2029. While giving away the SIDM Champion Awards, the Defence Minister repeated the target of lifting India’s defence exports to ₹50,000 crore by that year. The context makes the target easy to fix in memory: exports had just reached a record ₹38,424 crore in the financial year 2025-26, so the goal is a little over the level already achieved. Options A and B are wrong because the target year stated was neither of them, and option D is wrong because it is far later than the year named. Candidates should also recall the companion goal set out in the same speech, which is to raise the private sector’s share of the country’s total defence production from roughly 24 per cent to 50 per cent, a shift the minister said had already gained pace over the last dozen years.

The correct answer is Abhay, the hull-mounted sonar that lets the craft pick up submarines in coastal and shallow waters. Option C is the trap in this question: Maareech is indeed carried by the ship, but it is the Advanced Torpedo Decoy System used for self-protection, not a sonar. Options A and D are wrong in this context, as the announcement named only Abhay as the hull-mounted sonar. Along with the sonar, the craft carries lightweight torpedoes and an indigenous anti-submarine rocket launcher, and it is driven by three diesel engines with waterjet propulsion, an arrangement that allows tight manoeuvring in shallow seas. The combination of these sensors and weapons is what makes the ship suited to hunting submarines close to the coast, where larger warships are limited.

The correct answer is IGBC Gold. The project is being built to the norms of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and of the Indian Green Building Council, and on completion it is to be rated IGBC Gold. Option B is wrong because the rating stated is Gold and not Platinum, which is the higher grade of the same council. Options C and D name rating systems other than the Indian Green Building Council, so they are not the rating mentioned for this project. The same part of the announcement also records the indigenous content of the work: more than 90 per cent of the materials and equipment has been sourced within India, which the Ministry presents as an example of Aatmanirbhar Bharat in military infrastructure. Both facts are easy one-mark questions.

The correct answer is more than 38,000. The minister said more than 38,000 high-end GPUs have been onboarded under the IndiaAI Mission at roughly a third of the global average cost. Option B is the trap: 20,000 is the number of additional GPUs being added, not the number already onboarded. Options A and D do not match the figures given. The mission has an outlay of over ₹10,000 crore, and alongside compute it covers open data and talent through the AI Kosh platform, which unlocks datasets and sovereign models in agriculture, healthcare and education. India was also said to rank first globally in relative AI skill penetration, with Indian developers contributing about 5.2 per cent of open-source AI projects on GitHub that carry ten or more stars.

The correct answer is 2017. SIDM was set up in that year and has since grown into a common platform for large defence enterprises, micro, small and medium enterprises, startups, academic institutions and foreign original equipment manufacturers. At its eighth annual session the Defence Minister acknowledged the body’s part in building the domestic defence industrial base and in carrying industry views into policy discussion. Options A, B and D are wrong because none of them is the year of the organisation’s founding. For the examination hall, pair the founding year with the reforms the minister credited for widening private capability: the Defence Acquisition Procedure, the Defence Procurement Manual, the Positive Indigenisation Lists, the SRIJAN portal and Innovations for Defence Excellence, better known as iDEX.

The correct answer is Gujarat. Mangrol is a coastal town and a well-known fishing harbour in the Junagadh district of that state, and the Navy has used the name before: the minesweeper INS Mangrol, with the pennant M85, served until April 2004. Naming a new ship after a retired one is a standing practice in the Navy, meant to carry a vessel’s legacy forward. Option A is wrong, though Mumbai in Maharashtra is where the commissioning ceremony will be held. Option B is wrong, yet Kochi in Kerala is where the ship was built, so the two states are easy to confuse here. Option D is simply not connected with this ship. Aspirants should keep the three places apart: Gujarat for the name, Kerala for the builder and Maharashtra for the commissioning.

The correct answer is over 7.14 crore. The minister said the platform, which pairs artificial intelligence with data analytics, has facilitated the disconnection of more than 7.14 crore fraudulent mobile connections. Option A is a deliberate trap: 35 lakh is the number of lost handsets traced through the same platform, not the number of connections cut. Option B borrows the figure of 2.2 billion people worldwide who remain offline and recasts it as crore, so it is wrong. Option D does not match the number given. The platform has also prevented potential financial fraud worth over ₹5,000 crore. Alongside this, the Telecommunication Engineering Centre has developed national standards on AI fairness, robustness and incident reporting, and a National Working Group on AI Standardization aligns them with ITU-T benchmarks.

The correct answer is 15. A total of fifteen Champion Awards were handed out, recognising organisations for indigenous technology development, product innovation, design capability, import substitution, excellence in manufacturing and export performance. Option A is wrong, though the number eight does belong to this event in another way, as the awards were given at SIDM’s eighth annual session. Options B and D are wrong because no such count of awards was reported. Keep the two numbers apart in revision: eight for the edition of the annual session and fifteen for the awards. The theme of the session, worth remembering alongside, dealt with sovereign capabilities and contested frontiers, that is, with India’s strategic autonomy at a time of disruption.

The awards covered six broad areas of achievement, namely indigenous technology development, product innovation, design, import substitution, excellence in manufacturing and export performance, and they were given away in New Delhi in the presence of the Defence Secretary, the Director General (Acquisition) and the founder president as well as the serving president of the industry body.

The correct answer is B. More than four-fifths of the craft is of Indian origin, and it is propelled by three diesel engines that drive waterjets, which gives it the agility needed in shallow waters. Option A is wrong because Mangrol is a surface craft designed to hunt submarines, not a submarine itself. Option C is wrong because it is a small shallow water craft, not an aircraft carrier, although it will indeed serve under the Western Naval Command after being commissioned at Mumbai. Option D is wrong because the ship joins the Indian Navy and its role is anti-submarine warfare, along with underwater surveillance, low-intensity maritime operations and mine warfare related tasks. Its job is to protect ports, harbours and coastal approaches while working alongside patrol aircraft, helicopters and other warships.