State Exams Current Affairs Quiz: 13 October 2026

The correct answer is the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (MDoNER). Ashtalakshmi Darshan is that ministry's own youth-contact initiative: it brings students from states outside the region into the eight north-eastern states so that they meet the region's culture, institutions and development work directly. Union Minister for Communications and DoNER Jyotiraditya M. Scindia referred to the programme while meeting students at Mizoram University, and the ministry put the participation figure at more than 590 students in the past year. Option A, the Ministry of Culture, is wrong because the programme is not a culture-sector scheme even though cultural exchange is one of its aims. Option B, the Ministry of Education, is wrong because the students travel outside any academic curriculum or scholarship window. Option D, the Ministry of Tourism, is wrong because the tours are not a tourism-promotion product; the stated purpose is national integration and youth engagement under the Viksit Bharat 2047 goal.

The correct answer is Rs 1.87 lakh crore. Sales of khadi and village industry products in 2025-26 reached this level, the highest ever recorded for the sector, with the count taken up to May 2026. Compared with 2013-14 the sales figure is 501 per cent higher, so the year marks a record rather than an ordinary increase. Option B of Rs 1.25 lakh crore confuses sales with production, because output stood at Rs 1,25,296 crore after growing 380 per cent. Option C of Rs 2.04 lakh crore borrows the employment number, since jobs in the sector rose 56 per cent to 2.04 crore people, which is a count of workers and not money. Option D of Rs 1.45 lakh crore mixes in the 1,45,484 artisans who gained from assistance released to khadi institutions in 2024-25, again a count of people. Only the first option gives the sales value for the year.

The correct answer is New Delhi. The Bloomberg New Economy Forum, which gathers business leaders, policymakers and delegates from many countries for discussions on the economy, technology, energy and global affairs, was held in India for the first time, and the Prime Minister addressed the gathering in the national capital. He welcomed the delegates to India and congratulated Mr Bloomberg and his team for choosing the country as the venue, saying they had picked the right place at the right time. Mumbai, the financial capital, hosts many business summits but was not the venue of this edition. Bengaluru is the country's technology hub and also did not host it. Gandhinagar is associated with other investment events in Gujarat and is not the site of this forum. For the examination, remember the pairing of the forum, its first Indian edition and New Delhi as the city.

The correct answer is Shrutlekh. During the ice-breaking session of the capacity building programme on urban service delivery, the Digital India BHASHINI Division deployed Shrutlekh to translate speech as it was spoken, working in both directions between English and Spanish so that delegates from Spanish-speaking countries could take part without a language barrier. The platform is to remain available through the course, which concludes on 23 October 2026, subject to operational requirements. The other three names were not the platform used for this deployment. The deployment illustrates the division's Voice-First Multilingual AI approach, which aims to make digital services available through speech in many languages. Candidates should pair the name Shrutlekh with the Mussoorie programme and with the English and Spanish pairing, and should remember that the BHASHINI mobile application was also demonstrated to the visiting officials.

The correct answer is more than 590. That is the participation figure the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region gave for the Ashtalakshmi Darshan Programme over the past year, and it is the number an examiner is most likely to lift from this news. The students travel from states across the country; the batch Union Minister Jyotiraditya M. Scindia met at Mizoram University had come from Goa and Chandigarh. Options A and B understate the count, and option D overstates it, so all three miss the figure the ministry actually reported. Candidates should pair the number with the three other memorisable details of the programme: the ministry behind it, the idea of the region's eight states as the nation's Ashtalakshmi, and the link the ministry draws to the goal of a developed India by 2047.

The correct answer is 1956. KVIC is a statutory body established under the Khadi and Village Industries Commission Act of that year, and the Act is what gives the commission its mandate to plan, promote, facilitate, organise and assist village industries. The same mandate covers training, raw material supply, marketing, research and quality improvement, along with skill development and technical information for khadi and village industries. The other years do not carry this Act. Option A of 1948 belongs to the early years after independence and to the first industrial policy statement, not to this commission. Option B of 1951 is associated with the start of planned development in the country and not with khadi legislation. Option D of 1962 is later than the commission's creation and has no link with its founding law. Candidates should also recall that the commission now works under the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

The correct answer is November 2021. Under the Paris Agreement, India committed in 2015 to meeting 40 per cent of its installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources by 2030, and the Prime Minister told the forum that the country touched that level in November 2021 itself, nine years ahead of the deadline, becoming the first G20 nation to do so. Option B is wrong because the commitment had not been met by that year, and the achievement is counted nine years early against a 2030 target, which fixes the year as 2021. Option C comes after the milestone had already been reached and so cannot be the answer. Option D, August 2015, is the period when the pledge itself was being made rather than fulfilled. Link the three numbers together: the pledge of 2015, the target year of 2030 and the actual achievement in November 2021.

The correct answer is 2,353. BHASHINI, which serves as India's Language Digital Public Infrastructure, has had its language technologies built into that many government platforms, and these include more than 800 government websites, so option D names only the websites and not the full count of platforms. Options A and C are not the reported figures. The platform supports 36 Indian languages in text, 23 Indian languages in voice and 35 international languages, and it has delivered more than 9 billion cumulative artificial intelligence inferences, with the daily count running above 24 million. These numbers explain why the division was able to supply live translation at a training course for officials from several countries. Remember the set together: 2,353 platforms, over 800 websites, 36 languages in text and 23 in voice.

The correct answer is the eight states of the region. The North East is described as the country's Ashtalakshmi, the eightfold form of prosperity, with each of its eight states standing for one form of that wealth. It is the framing Prime Minister Narendra Modi uses for the region, and it is the idea on which the Ashtalakshmi Darshan Programme of the DoNER ministry rests: the tours are meant to show visiting students that the region is a source of national prosperity rather than a distant periphery. Option B is wrong because the expression counts states, not border districts. Option C is wrong because it has nothing to do with the region's river systems, however important they are to it. Option D is wrong because autonomous tribal councils are a feature of the constitutional arrangements for some of these states and are not what the eight in Ashtalakshmi counts.

The correct answer is 840 yards. A hank is the unit in which a khadi spinner's work is measured, and one hank equals 840 yards of yarn in length and one pound by weight. The unit matters because artisan remuneration is paid on it: pay has gone up from Rs 4 per hank in 2013-14 to Rs 15 per hank at present, an increase of about 275 per cent. Option A of 640 yards, option C of 1,000 yards and option D of 1,200 yards are not the measure used for a hank, and a candidate who remembers only the round thousand will get the sum wrong. Women make up more than 80 per cent of the nearly five lakh artisans in the khadi sector, so this wage unit decides the earnings of a largely female workforce. Remember the pair together: 840 yards by length and one pound by weight.

The correct answer is 7.8 per cent. Speaking at the forum, the Prime Minister said India's growth rate in the April-June quarter of this year stood at that level, and he described the growth as resting on a strong base. The supporting figures he gave were a current account deficit that has dropped to about half a per cent of GDP, or 0.61 per cent last year, against more than 4 per cent twelve to thirteen years ago, foreign exchange reserves above 700 billion dollars and a banking system in its strongest position in many decades. Options A and B understate the quarter's performance, while option D of 8.4 per cent overstates it, and none of the three was the figure cited. Aspirants should also remember the reform list placed beside these numbers: GST replacing a complex web of taxes, the insolvency law, 29 labour laws merged into four codes and hundreds of minor business offences decriminalised.

The correct answer is the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances. The National Centre for Good Governance works under this department and organises the Capacity Building Programme on Urban Service Delivery for Civil Servants of Multiple Countries, held at Mussoorie from 12 to 23 October 2026. The course is sponsored by the Ministry of External Affairs and forms part of India's international capacity building effort under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme. Officials taking part come from countries including Peru, Cambodia, Nigeria, Kenya, Palestine, Lebanon, The Gambia, Ecuador and Spain. Option B handles civil service personnel matters but is not named as the organiser here, while option C deals with industry and trade promotion and option D with public expenditure, neither of which runs this programme. Keep the chain in mind: NCGG, DARPG, MEA sponsorship and the ITEC framework.