UPSC Civil Services Current Affairs Quiz: 24 September 2026

The correct answer is six months. Under the earlier design of the scheme a placement counted only when the trained candidate held continuous employment for at least three months, so option A states the old rule and not the present one. The upgraded guidelines that the Government notified in May 2025 doubled that floor, so that training is judged by work that lasts rather than by a short spell of employment, and the revised rules recognise continuous as well as non-continuous employment, including wage work, self-employment and gig work. Option C names a period the guidelines do not use at any stage. Option D is the period for which a placed candidate is tracked after joining, and also the point at which upskilling and reskilling opportunities open up, but tracking is not the same thing as the placement test itself, so it does not answer the question.

The correct answer is Prasar Bharati, India's public service broadcaster. PBSHABD is its free news feed, and the very name carries the parent body in it, since it expands to Prasar Bharati - Shared Audio-Visuals for Broadcast and Dissemination. The service grew out of the broadcaster's own internal wire, the Prasar Bharati News Service, and it draws on the same correspondents and desks that feed bulletins on Akashvani and Doordarshan. Option A names a news agency that is not connected with this platform. Option C is the government's own publicity arm, which issues press releases rather than running this multimedia feed. Option D is a training and research institution in mass communication and has no role in running the service. The ministry in charge of the launch was Information and Broadcasting.

The correct answer is the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, usually written as DARPG. It runs the special campaign across the Government, lays down the parameters against which each office identifies its pending matters, issues the guidelines that offices follow, and takes the reporting of achievements on the campaign portal. Option B names the department that is implementing the drive in this particular case, which is the trap in the question: DEPwD is a participating department, not the one that launched the campaign. Option C handles service and personnel matters for the Government and is not the nodal department for this drive. Option D deals with public finance and expenditure control, and has no role in running the cleanliness and pendency campaign. Remember DARPG as the nodal department, and remember that each participating department nominates its own Nodal Officer.

The correct answer is nil. Among the oils covered by this decision, crude sunflower oil is the only one whose Basic Customs Duty was taken all the way down to zero, from the earlier level of 10%. Option A names the new rate of the other two oils in the announcement, crude soybean oil and crude palm oil, each of which came down from 10% to 5%, so it is the right figure attached to the wrong oil. Option D is the rate that applied before the change and not the rate that applies now, and a candidate who reads the question in a hurry can easily settle on the old number. Option C is a rate that does not figure in this decision at all. The safest way to hold the answer is to remember the pattern: one oil to zero, two oils to five, all three starting from ten.

The correct answer is the 81st session, written in the release as UNGA81 and held in New York. Both engagements India took part in were side events of that session: the ministerial meeting of the Group of Friends of Universal Health Coverage and Global Health, and the launch of the OneSCD partnership on sickle cell disease. The session number is worth fixing in memory because the General Assembly meets in a fresh numbered session every year, and an examiner will often pair the number with the event rather than with the year. Options A and B name earlier sessions and option D a later one, and a candidate who remembers only that the meeting took place in New York, which is where the Assembly always convenes, will have nothing to choose between them. Note also that a side event sits alongside the Assembly rather than being an Assembly debate itself.

The correct answer is Rs 63.84 crore, the financial support agreed under the Research Development and Innovation Fund and routed through optionally convertible debentures rather than paid out as a simple grant. Keep it apart from the other money figure in the same announcement, the total approved cost of the project, which is far larger; a question will often place the two side by side to see whether a candidate has confused the support with the whole outlay. Options A and C are the same digits rearranged, a trap that works precisely because the figure carries two decimal places and is easy to garble under time pressure. Option D is a round-looking amount that appears nowhere in the announcement. The safest habit is to read such a figure once as a whole number of crore and once as its decimal part.

The correct answer is the 24th edition. The Ministry of Defence announcement names the edition explicitly, and it is the single most asked detail about a recurring exercise, because the number records how far back the series goes and distinguishes this year's round from every earlier one. Options B and D sit on either side of the right answer and are the classic way of testing whether a candidate has read the number or merely recognised the name of the exercise. Option A is easy to pick for a different reason, since the ship reached the port on the twenty-second day of the month, and a date and an edition number that look alike are readily swapped in memory. Keep the two apart: the edition is the 24th, while 22 September 2026 is the day of arrival at Toulon.

The correct answer is 25 September 2014, under the National Rural Livelihoods Mission. The Ministry of Rural Development started the scheme on that date to give placement-linked skill training to youth of 15 to 35 years from poor rural households, and the scheme is marking its twelfth anniversary this year. Option B moves the launch a year later and attaches the scheme to a different skilling programme, which the ministry does not name as its parent. Option C picks a date associated with cleanliness and rural employment programmes rather than with this scheme, and MGNREGA is a wage employment law, not the mission under which rural skilling sits. Option D names neither the right date nor the right parent mission. The pairing to remember is DDU-GKY with the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, also written as DAY-NRLM.

The correct answer is March 2027. Free access has been stretched in steps rather than granted once and for all, which is exactly what makes this a favourite question. When the platform completed a year of operation, free access was extended to March 2026, and it was later extended again, this time up to March 2027, so media organisations can plan their use of the feed with some certainty. Option A is the month in which the first extension was announced, not the date up to which the service is free. Option B was the earlier assurance and has since been superseded, so it is the classic trap for a candidate who has read an older report. Option D is simply beyond anything announced. The service charges registered users no subscription fee for what they download.

The correct answer is 2 to 31 October 2026. The campaign is run in two clearly separated stages, and a question of this kind usually turns on telling them apart. Option A gives the dates of the preparatory phase, which is the stretch in which offices identify the files, references and grievances that they will take up, fix targets and put the institutional arrangements in place. The implementation phase that follows is the month in which that identified pendency is actually disposed of, space is freed and e-waste is collected, segregated and sent for disposal. Option C names a month in which no phase of the campaign falls. Option D repeats the dates of the previous edition, Special Campaign 5.0, which was held a year earlier and whose results form the baseline for this year's drive.

The correct answer is 19.25%. While cutting the duty on crude oils, the government also trimmed the duty on the matching refined oils, but it kept the distance between the two rates at this level rather than letting it shrink. The purpose is stated plainly: a gap of this size keeps domestic refining capacity in use, discourages excessive imports of refined oil and gives Indian refiners a more level playing field, so the value addition takes place within the country. Options A, B and D are plausible only because they look like tariff percentages of the same order, and none of them is the figure named in the announcement. This is the single number from the decision that a paper setter is most likely to ask for, because it carries a policy reason with it rather than being a bare rate.

The correct answer is more than 497 million. The Union Health Secretary cited this figure as proof that technology is closing the distance between a patient in a remote area and a doctor, and she placed it beside the other digital health number from the same speech, namely that over 900 million citizens now hold a unique health identity. Alongside e-Sanjeevani she mentioned teleradiology, X-rays read with the help of artificial intelligence and Mobile Medical Units. Options A, B and D are close enough in size to be tempting, and the way to keep them out is to pair the teleconsultation count with the scheme that produced it rather than trying to recall a bare number. Remember also that e-Sanjeevani is a teleconsultation service, so the figure counts consultations and not patients or health records.

The correct answer is Rs 247.69 crore. This is the approved cost of the whole project, of which the Technology Development Board is supporting a part from the Research Development and Innovation Fund, the rest being borne by the company. The distinction matters because a public fund of this kind is meant to share the risk of a costly technology programme rather than to pay for it outright, which is also why the support takes the form of optionally convertible debentures. Options A, C and D keep the decimal part and change only the leading digit, so a candidate who has memorised the figure loosely will not be able to separate them. Pair the two numbers in your notes as support and total cost, and the pair becomes easier to recall than either figure on its own.

The correct answer is France. VARUNA is the naval exercise that India holds with the French Navy, and the supporting detail in this announcement points the same way, since the Indian ship has berthed at Toulon, a French port on the Mediterranean, for the harbour and sea phases of the exercise. The announcement also frames the visit as a sign of an enduring maritime partnership between India and France and of cooperation between them that keeps widening. The other options name countries with which India does conduct naval exercises, which is exactly why they are placed here as distractors, and a candidate who remembers only that the exercise is bilateral, or who recalls the name without the partner, has no way to choose. Tie the name of the exercise to the partner navy, and the port to the partner as well.

The correct answer is 7,620 rupees, at 1,270 rupees a month for six months. The support is deliberately paid month by month over the same six months that now make up the minimum placement period, so that the money helps a candidate stay in a new job and a new city rather than arriving as one lump sum. Option A is wrong because the assistance is not a single grant on joining. Option C invents both the total and the monthly rate. Option D is wrong because post-placement support is one of the features that the upgraded framework strengthened: besides the monthly assistance, a candidate who remains employed for 365 days, with an employment break of no more than 60 days, receives a retention amount of 5,000 rupees, and upskilling opportunities follow twelve months of placement.

The correct answer is that the content carries no logo and needs no credit line. This is the feature that sets the platform apart from a conventional news agency, because a small newspaper can run a national or international story under its own masthead without attributing it to the broadcaster. Option A reverses that rule. Option C is wrong because the feed offers news in 15 Indian languages and under nearly 50 news categories, in five formats covering text, video, audio, photographs and infographics, which is what makes it useful to regional newsrooms. Option D is wrong because registration is open to newspapers and journals holding a valid RNI certificate, to television and radio stations holding uplink and downlink certificates, and to digital publishers who submit a copy of their PAN. Each organisation gets one login to share within its newsroom.

The correct answer is 14,47,619 rupees. The money came from the disposal of files, obsolete material and scrap during the month-long drive held from 2 to 31 October 2025. The other options are the campaign's remaining figures moved into the wrong place, which is how such questions are usually framed. Option A is the number of physical files and documents that were digitised and weeded out during that campaign. Option B is the office space, measured in square feet, that was freed for use. Option D inflates the number of cleanliness drives, which stood at 64, into a sum of money. A candidate should therefore memorise the four results of Special Campaign 5.0 together with the unit attached to each of them, because the unit is what the examiner tests.

The correct answer is the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, which put out this announcement along with the advisory to the edible oil associations. The reason it and not another ministry speaks here is that the stated purpose of the step is to moderate retail prices of cooking oil and to shield the household budget from imported inflation, which falls squarely within the consumer affairs and food distribution mandate. Option A is tempting because customs duty is a tax matter, and it is a useful reminder that the ministry which announces a measure need not be the one that collects the levy. Option B deals with trade policy and option C with the interests of the oilseed grower, and both of those interests are mentioned in the announcement, but neither ministry issued it.

The correct answer is 2047. The mission was launched in 2023 and its target year is the centenary of independence, which is why that year recurs across so many national goals and why it is the one to remember here. Option A is the year attached to a different goal mentioned in the very same release, the elimination of Hepatitis B and C as public health threats, so a candidate who mixes the two diseases will lose the mark. Options B and C are round years that carry no goal in this release at all. Along with the year, remember the mission's numbers, which India presented at the OneSCD launch: more than 7.29 crore people screened, over 20 lakh carriers identified, 2.5 lakh diagnosed and more than 4.93 crore sickle cell cards distributed, together with work on point-of-care diagnostics, hydroxyurea therapy and an indigenous gene-editing therapy.

The correct answer is Synthetic Aperture Radar and electro-optical imaging, and the name of the technology is itself the clue, since Opto stands for the optical sensor and SAR for the radar. The two are put on one platform because their weaknesses do not overlap: optical imaging gives rich visual detail but is defeated by cloud cover and by darkness, while radar works irrespective of daylight and can image through cloud. Fusing the two data streams therefore yields a fuller and less interrupted view of the ground, which is what makes wide-area surveillance, detection of people and vehicles and classification of targets possible in all weather. Options B, C and D list real remote-sensing techniques, but none of them is the pair named here, and option D also includes sonar, which works in water rather than from orbit.

The correct answer is submarine rescue certification, which the announcement does not mention at all. What it does list are professional engagements in harbour and at sea of three kinds: cross-deck visits, in which sailors of one navy go aboard the other's ship; operational interactions, in which the two crews compare their drills and procedures; and sporting engagements between the ships' companies. Through these the two navies expect to share experience and best practices, raise their interoperability and build mutual understanding. Options A, B and C are therefore all named in the release and cannot be the answer to a question framed in the negative. Questions of this form reward careful reading of a short release, because the wrong option is usually something that sounds thoroughly naval and would fit an exercise of this kind, yet is simply absent from the text.

The correct answer is the Price to Distributors and the Maximum Retail Price, usually written as PTD and MRP. The advisory issued to the edible oil associations and other industry stakeholders asks them to bring both of these down in step with the lower landed cost, and to advise member firms to act without delay, so that the gain from the tariff cut is not retained in the supply chain. Option A lists prices paid to farmers for crops, which are fixed by the government and are not what a refiner or a packer revises. Option C names two price indices, which measure inflation rather than set it, so they cannot be revised by a company at all. Option D refers to prices in the public distribution system, a separate arrangement for subsidised foodgrain.

The correct answer is Nigeria. OneSCD, described as a global partnership to advance equity and transform sickle cell care, was launched with the Government of Nigeria among its partners, along with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Africa CDC, the World Coalition on Sickle Cell Disease and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The other options are African countries as well, which is exactly why they are placed here: sickle cell disease carries a heavy burden across the continent, so any of them sounds possible, and only the partner list settles the question. For the examination hall, hold the launch, the partners and the purpose together, and remember that India's own contribution to the discussion was the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission with its screening drive and its target of ending the disease as a public health problem by 2047.

The correct answer is TRL-6 to TRL-9. Technology Readiness Level is a scale for how far a technology has travelled from an idea towards routine use, and the stretch named here is the late one: a system already demonstrated in conditions close to the real environment has to be engineered, tested and validated until it is proven in actual service. The Board describes its role in exactly those terms, as support through the critical stages between advanced development and deployment, with commercialisation as the eventual aim. Options A and B describe earlier stages, where the work is closer to laboratory research than to flight hardware, and a candidate who assumes that public funding always goes to early research will be drawn to them. Option D stops short of the top of the scale and so does not match the stated goal of reaching deployment.