30 September 2026 Current Affairs: SBM 2.0, India Mining Week 2026

The Constitution (Fortieth Amendment) Act, 1976 rewrote Article 297 so that all lands, minerals and other things of value lying in the territorial waters, the continental shelf and the exclusive economic zone of India vest in the Union and are held for the purposes of the Union.

Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt won the Grammy Award in 1994 for the album A Meeting by the River, which he recorded with the American slide guitarist Ry Cooder in the world music category.

The Kakrapar Atomic Power Station stands in Surat district of Gujarat, on the bank of the Tapi, and is run by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India.

IISCO has its works at Burnpur, near Asansol in West Bengal, on the Kolkata-Asansol railway line, and it became a subsidiary of the Steel Authority of India and was later merged into it, the plant now being run as the IISCO Steel Plant.

In the Census of 2011 Jharkhand recorded a density of about 414 persons per square kilometre, the highest among the four states named.

Drosera, known as the sundew, is an insect-eating plant whose leaves are covered with stalked glands tipped with a shining drop of sticky fluid.

Gandhi's first satyagraha in India was fought in 1917 at Champaran in Bihar, where indigo planters forced tenants to grow indigo on a fixed part of their holding under the tinkathia system.

The neonatal period is the first 28 completed days after birth, and the neonatal mortality rate counts the deaths in that period for every 1,000 live births in a year.

Mandamus is a Latin word meaning we command, and the writ is an order from a court to a public official, a public body, a corporation or a lower court to perform a public duty it has refused to do.

Acoustics is the branch of physics that deals with how sound is produced, how it travels and how it is heard or absorbed.

The repo rate is the rate at which the Reserve Bank lends short-term money to banks against government securities. When inflation keeps rising, the Reserve Bank raises this rate, so banks borrow less and charge more on their own loans, spending and demand cool down and prices rise more slowly.

Sandalwood is a tree of the tropical deciduous or monsoon forests, and in India it grows best on the dry eastern slopes of the Western Ghats in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Article 148 of the Constitution creates the office of the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India, who audits all receipts and expenditure of the Union and the States and of bodies largely financed from public funds.

The Nagpur Plan, drawn up at a conference of chief engineers of the provinces and states held at Nagpur in 1943, was the first attempt at planned road development in India and covered the twenty years from 1943 to 1963.

Campos are the tropical grasslands of the Brazilian Highlands, so this is the only pair in the list that names a tropical grassland.

A concave lens is a diverging lens, so for every position of a real object it forms an image that is virtual, erect and diminished.

The grooves cut into a sole grip the ground, so the foot does not slip while walking or running. Friction is the force that acts between two surfaces in contact and opposes motion between them.

An earthquake is the shaking of the ground when energy stored along a fault is suddenly released, and that shaking sets off further hazards.

Jyotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Truth Seekers' Society, at Pune in 1873 to fight caste rank and priestly control in Maharashtra.

All three are unicellular, which means a single cell carries out every job of life. In a unicellular organism that one cell manages nutrition, respiration, movement and reproduction, while a multicellular body shares the work among tissues and organs.

Chola temples such as the Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur, built by Rajaraja I, were far more than places of worship.

This Act ended the last trading rights of the East India Company, its monopoly of trade with China and of the tea trade, and turned the Company into a purely administrative body holding India in trust for the British Crown.

The buccal cavity is the mouth, and the saliva poured into it begins the digestion of starch, a carbohydrate. Three pairs of salivary glands supply saliva, which carries the enzyme salivary amylase, also called ptyalin.

The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act was passed in July 1856 and made the remarriage of a Hindu widow lawful, so that the children of such a marriage were treated as legitimate.

Geitonogamy is pollination between two different flowers borne on the same plant.

Article 315 provides for a Public Service Commission for the Union and a Public Service Commission for each State, and allows two or more States to ask Parliament for a Joint Public Service Commission.

The poise is the CGS unit of dynamic or absolute viscosity, named after the French physician Jean Poiseuille, and one poise equals one dyne-second per square centimetre, which is the same as one gram per centimetre per second.

The National Green Tribunal was set up under the National Green Tribunal Act of 2010 to settle cases on the environment, forests, water, air and biodiversity quickly, and India thus became one of the first countries in the world to create a special court of this kind.

Section 22 of the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 allows a person aggrieved by an award, order or decision of the Tribunal to appeal to the Supreme Court within ninety days of the day it is communicated, and the Court may admit a later appeal if it is satisfied that…

A.C. Pigou belongs to the welfare group of definitions, not the wealth group.

Marble is a non-metallic mineral: no metal can be drawn out of it, and it is used as a building and sculpting stone, the Makrana marble of Rajasthan being the stone of the Taj Mahal.

India Post moves its mail through six named channels, and there is no 'Monthly channel' among them. Under the Mail Network Optimisation Project the department separated its traffic so that each kind of article travels on a route with its own time norms.

Chola inscriptions use a separate term for every kind of land grant, and tirunamattukkani is the land whose produce was set apart for a temple.

Lord Curzon announced the partition of Bengal on 19 July 1905 and it came into effect on 16 October 1905, splitting the province into a Muslim-majority eastern half and the rest of Bengal.

The Vernacular Press Act was enacted in 1878 by Lord Lytton to silence Indian-language newspapers, which had begun to criticise British rule sharply, especially over the famine and the cost of the Delhi Durbar.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 promises every rural household at least 100 days of unskilled manual wage work in a financial year.

India's climate is usually called a tropical monsoon type, because the Tropic of Cancer runs across the middle of the country and the seasonal reversal of winds brings almost all of its rain.

The female egg cell, or ovum, is the largest cell in the human body. It measures about 100 to 130 micrometres across, roughly the thickness of a hair, and is the only human cell that can just be seen without a microscope.

Moatsu is a festival of the Ao tribe of Nagaland, kept in the first week of May once the fields have been cleared, the seed sown and the seedlings planted.

The Reserve Bank of India, which began work on 1 April 1935 on the recommendation of the Hilton Young Commission, was also the central bank of Burma, then part of British India, and it stayed in that role until April 1947, a few months before India became independent.

The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development has its head office in Mumbai, in the Bandra Kurla Complex.

Yakshagana is the folk theatre of coastal Karnataka, performed mainly in the Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada districts.

The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in Japan in December 1997 and in force from February 2005, set binding cuts for six greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride.

The Industrial Disputes Act was passed in 1947 and governs how disputes between employers and workmen, including matters that concern trade unions as well as individual workmen, are raised and settled.

Cyclical unemployment is the unemployment that a slump or depression in the economy creates: when demand falls, firms sell less, cut production and let workers go, and those jobs come back once demand recovers.

The Sun Temple at Konark in Odisha is called the Black Pagoda, a name European sailors gave it because its dark stone tower stood out as a landmark along the coast, in contrast to the whitewashed Jagannath temple at Puri, which they called the White Pagoda.

Article 17 abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form. It sits in Part III among the Fundamental Rights, under the right to equality, and it is one of the few rights that works against ordinary citizens as well as against the State.

The Planning Commission was set up in March 1950 by a resolution of the Union Cabinet, not by the Constitution and not by an Act of Parliament, which made it an extra-constitutional advisory body.

The call ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ closes the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, and it became the rallying cry of the socialist movement that carried the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917.

Disguised unemployment is the situation in which more people work at a job than it actually needs, so taking some of them away would not reduce output at all.