UPSC GK Questions 2026

CSIR-NPL, ISRO and the Legal Metrology Department jointly established secondary timescales at Regional Reference Standard Laboratories in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Faridabad and Guwahati.

It is India's National Metrology Institute, mandated to set up primary national standards and to disseminate them.

The Rules were notified by the Department of Consumer Affairs on 27 August 2026 and published in the Official Gazette on 29 August 2026, and the release states that they take effect 180 days from the date of that publication.

He is quoted in the release saying that the rapid scale-up of banking activity at GIFT-IFSC shows the depth and growing international orientation of India's International Financial Services Centre, and that the centre is serving as an effective bridge between global pools of capital and India's financing needs.

Indian banks raised that amount through bond listings on IFSC exchanges over the five months from April to August 2026.

The release describes IFSCA as the unified regulatory authority set up by the Government of India under an Act of Parliament for the development and regulation of financial products, financial services and financial institutions in India's International Financial Services Centres.

That is the figure twenty IFSC Banking Units had sanctioned under the Reserve Bank's special swap facility for FCNR(B) deposits as on 31 August 2026, and about USD 52.82 billion of it had already been disbursed.

JCR pointed to three things behind the better asset quality of Indian banks: the establishment of this Code, the capital the Government infused into banks, and stronger supervision by the Reserve Bank of India.

It is a multilateral development bank that lends to its member countries; it is not a credit rating agency and assigns no sovereign ratings, so it cannot appear in this list.

JCR noted that the Centre's fiscal deficit came down from 4.7 per cent in FY25 to 4.4 per cent in FY26, and that this happened while capital spending was kept high, with infrastructure investment given particular weight.

The agency moved both the long-term foreign currency issuer rating and the long-term local currency issuer rating up by exactly one notch, from BBB+ to A-, and kept the outlook at stable.

Constant-price estimates for mining are built from the Index of Industrial Production, which grew -3.8 per cent in April, -1.4 per cent in May and 1.6 per cent in June, broadly matching real GVA growth of -2.4 per cent.

The release says the first quarter of 2026-27 should be compared with the earlier first-quarter figure from the same series, and in doing so it names the current-price estimate for the quarter.

Double deflation is a production-side technique: gross output is deflated with one price index and intermediate consumption with another, and real Gross Value Added is what remains after subtracting the second from the first.

The backgrounder states that the updated series of annual and quarterly GDP estimates, released on 31 August 2026, takes 2022-23 as its base year.

Speaking about what lies ahead, the Minister noted that the RDI Fund is offering support at a later stage, at the TRL4 level, and that the Technology Development Board was the first to roll out its proposals under the fund.

The Minister said start-ups are not confined to Bengaluru or Hyderabad and that more than 50 per cent of them come from smaller towns, a figure he used while asking for prevailing myths about entrepreneurship to be dispelled.

The board was created so that technologies would not remain confined to laboratories but would be translated into products, solutions and enterprises that bring ease of living, provide livelihoods and add to the economy of the country.

The release refers throughout to the ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund, and it is the size of that corpus that makes the Minister's appeal for outreach necessary: thousands of applications are arriving, some from applicants who do not appear to understand what the fund is for.

In his video message the Minister said India has one of the longest stretches of coastal area in the world, spanning more than that distance and extending from the eastern to the western parts of the country, and he used the figure to explain why a week-long national drive is…