21 October 2026 Current Affairs: SARAS Mela 2026

India, Nepal and the Maldives signed the SAARC Charter in 1985, while Afghanistan joined only in 2007. SAARC was set up at the Dhaka summit on 8 December 1985 by seven South Asian countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The Kalaram temple stands at Panchavati in Nashik, Maharashtra, where Dr B. R. Ambedkar led the famous temple entry satyagraha.

The manjaniq was a siege engine that hurled heavy stones at fort walls and defenders. The word comes from Arabic and is related to the Greek and Latin words that also gave English the term mangonel.

The FATF sets the international standards that countries follow to fight dirty money and terror funding. The FATF is an inter-governmental body set up in 1989 at the G7 summit in Paris, and its secretariat is housed at the OECD in Paris.

Jordan lies north of the peninsula in the Levant, while Kuwait, Oman and Yemen are all on the Arabian Peninsula.

Rhizopus, the bread mould, feeds on dead and decaying organic matter, which is exactly what a saprophyte does. A saprophyte gets its food by releasing digestive enzymes onto dead matter such as stale bread, fruit or leaf litter and then absorbing the simple nutrients that result.

For resistors in parallel the reciprocals add: 1/11 + 1/22 + 1/33 = 11/66 = 1/6, so the equivalent resistance is 6 Ω. Taking 66 as the common denominator, 1/11 becomes 6/66, 1/22 becomes 3/66 and 1/33 becomes 2/66.

All three statements describe India's two coasts correctly: the west is high, rocky and erosional, the east is low and depositional.

Petrol is one of the petroleum products kept out of GST for now, so it still bears central excise duty and state VAT.

In a centripetal pattern streams flow inward from all sides into a central lake or basin, like spokes pointing to a hub.

The Sea of Azov joins the Black Sea through the narrow Kerch Strait, east of the Crimean peninsula. The Sea of Azov is bordered by Russia and Ukraine and is often called the shallowest sea in the world, with a maximum depth of only about 14 metres.

As its name says, it is subsistence farming, where the family grows food mainly for its own use, not for sale.

Expressed as women per men, Asia has a low sex ratio, because several of its large countries have fewer women than men.

The law of demand assumes buyers are not swayed by imitating others; the demonstration effect is in fact one of its exceptions.

Tamil Nadu's decadal growth rose from about 11.7 per cent in 1991–2001 to about 15.6 per cent in 2001–2011, while the other three states slowed down.

Lysosomes bud off from the Golgi apparatus as small membrane-bound sacs packed with digestive enzymes. The hydrolytic enzymes of a lysosome are first made on ribosomes attached to the rough endoplasmic reticulum.

Flint glass contains lead oxide, which gives it a high refractive index and clarity, so it is used for lenses and prisms of optical instruments.

Cropping intensity is gross cropped area divided by net sown area, usually shown as a percentage, and it tells how many times the same land is cropped in a year.

The base is made thin and lightly doped so that most charge carriers from the emitter cross it to the collector.

Both were killed in 1942 during the Quit India Movement, Matangini Hazra in Bengal and Lakshman Naik in Odisha. The Quit India Movement began after the Congress passed the Quit India resolution in Bombay on 8 August 1942, with Gandhi's call of 'Do or Die'.

Article 18 of the UN Charter lists all three as 'important questions' that need a two-thirds majority of members present and voting.

Antarctica is the highest continent on average, and Mount Vinson is its highest peak. Antarctica's average elevation is about 2,500 metres, far above that of any other continent; Asia, the next highest, averages under 1,000 metres.

The nucellus is the diploid tissue of the ovule itself, while the synergids, the egg and the antipodals are haploid cells of the embryo sac.

A hydrogen bomb fuses light hydrogen nuclei, while a uranium bomb splits heavy uranium-235 nuclei. In nuclear fission a heavy nucleus such as uranium-235 absorbs a neutron and splits into two lighter nuclei, releasing energy and two or three more neutrons.

The two statements are reversed: the Estimates Committee is a standing committee, and the Railway Convention Committee is an ad hoc committee.

A change in a good's own price, with everything else fixed, moves the buyer up or down the same demand curve.

In the southern hemisphere the Coriolis force turns winds to the left, not the right. The Coriolis force is an apparent force caused by the Earth's rotation.

The Climax mine is in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains near Leadville, and it was long the world's largest molybdenum mine.

India's land-use records follow a nine-fold classification, and 'marginal land' is not one of its classes.

The Pakistani economist Mahbub-ul-Haq gave the concept of human development and launched the first Human Development Report for the UNDP in 1990.

Every biological molecule, from sugars and fats to proteins and DNA, is built on a skeleton of carbon atoms, which is why carbon is called the basic building block of life.

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu worshipped God in a personal form, as Krishna, so he belonged to the Saguna school of Bhakti, not the Nirguna school.

The Harappan script has never been deciphered, so no one can say what it refers to; the name Meluhha comes from Mesopotamian texts, not from Harappan writing.

These four early communists were convicted in the Cawnpore (Kanpur) Bolshevik Conspiracy Case of 1924 and sentenced to four years in jail.

Nekton are animals large enough to be seen with the naked eye that swim actively and can move against water currents.

When water is short, leaves make more abscisic acid (ABA), which makes the guard cells lose water and close the stomata, so the plant loses less water through transpiration.

Potassium carbonate comes from a strong base and a weak acid, so statement 1 is wrong, while statements 2 and 3 are right.

Retail core inflation is the rise in the Consumer Price Index after leaving out its two most volatile groups, food and beverages and fuel and light.

At spring tide the pulls of the Sun and the Moon add up, so the tidal range is at its greatest.

The Paramahansa Mandali was a Maharashtra body, founded in Bombay, not in Bengal by Swami Vivekananda, while the Prarthana Samaj was indeed a Maharashtra reform movement.

The Congress Socialist Party was formed in 1934 by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and Minoo Masani, not by M. N. Roy.

Siddhartha's mother, Queen Maya, died a few days after his birth, and her younger sister Mahapajapati Gotami brought him up as her own son.

Disinvestment, small savings and market borrowing either create a liability for the government or reduce its assets, so they are capital receipts; interest received is a revenue receipt.

Sangam literature describes Tamilakam as the land stretching from the Venkatam hills, around Tirupati, in the north to Kumari, the southern tip of the peninsula.

The inner planets are the four that orbit the Sun inside the asteroid belt: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter divides the solar system into two groups.

Bodhisattas were seen as deeply compassionate beings who gathered merit by their efforts, but they used that merit to help others rather than to attain nibbana for themselves.

Too little fluoride in drinking water leaves tooth enamel weak, so teeth decay more easily and develop cavities, called dental caries.

Under the Rules of Procedure of the Lok Sabha, a member who wants to move a resolution to remove the Speaker must give notice of it in writing to the Secretary General.

The huge open-air rock relief at Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram) in Tamil Nadu, known as the Descent of the Ganga or Arjuna's Penance, shows the river coming down from heaven to the earth.

Carborundum, or silicon carbide (SiC), is one of the hardest substances known, so it can grind, cut and polish other materials, which is what an abrasive must do.