Current affairs

The report in four numbers

The pathway

• The UN's first "overshoot, peak, and decline" pathway is not acceptable or preferred, it says, only the best remaining option.

The science

• The 1.5°C goal refers to warming averaged over decades, so a single year above it does not breach it.
• Cutting methane, a short-lived climate pollutant, is the most effective way to slow warming in the near term.
• Carbon dioxide removal is unlikely to reverse more than a few tenths of a degree this century.
• Returning below 1.5°C will not stop sea level rise or undo extinctions.
• A longer overshoot raises the risk of tipping points in the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

The politics

• Article 2 of the Paris Agreement holds warming well below 2°C and pursues 1.5°C, goals first set in the Cancun Agreements (COP16, 2010).
• COP30's Global Mutirão decision (2025) was the first COP text to concede a likely temporary overshoot.
• UNEP put developing countries' adaptation needs above $310 billion a year by 2035.
• Adaptation finance, on which the report says little, is expected to divide COP31 in Türkiye in November.
• India has not joined the Global Methane Pledge, arguing that developed countries owe finance and affordable technology.

For the exam

• Prelims: the Paris temperature goals, the 1.8°C peak and the tipping elements.
• Mains, GS2 and GS3: adaptation finance and climate justice in an overshoot world.

From a mountain wall to the Gandak

Why it is not called a GLOF

• A glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) begins when a lake's natural dam fails, but this began with a slope failure of ice and rock.
• A debris flow erodes riverbanks and gains mass and momentum downstream, which is why experts called this one a sediment bomb.

How warming loosens slopes

• Meltwater widens crevasses and, at the glacier bed, can destabilise large blocks of ice.
• Retreating glaciers strip the snow that cushioned rock walls, leaving rock and ice perched on bare slopes.
• Thawing permafrost removes the ice that cements rock and sediment together.

Why the warning came late

• Nepal's warning system issues flood alerts when it detects rain, and this flood did not begin with rain.
• The site was not on Nepal's list of places at high risk of glacial detachment.
• The flow's seismic signal was first read as an earthquake, so environmental seismology is proposed as an added layer of warning.

The regional trend in the Hindu Kush Himalaya

For the exam

• Prelims: ICIMOD, the Kathmandu based intergovernmental centre that monitors the Hindu Kush Himalaya.
• Mains, GS3: cascading hazards, and warning systems that watch only for rain.
• Mains, GS3: about a tenth of Nepal's hydropower capacity (431 MW) hit by one event, a caution on building in glacier fed valleys.

India's reply

• India invoked common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, with developed countries leading on emissions cuts, finance and technology.
• Nepal produces about 0.1 per cent of global emissions.
• India's per capita emissions, around 2 tonnes a year, are about half the global average.

A small fund

• Contributions are voluntary, and the United States has pulled out.
• The decision adopting the Paris Agreement says Article 8 gives no basis for liability or compensation.

Loss and damage in the climate regime

The science

• Many glacial lakes are dammed by moraine, loose rock and sediment left by a glacier, rather than bedrock.

Mapping

• The National Remote Sensing Centre's Glacial Lake Atlas mapped 28,043 lakes in the Himalayan river basins, almost 73 per cent of them outside India.

Mapped lakes inside India

Ranking risk

• The Central Water Commission's risk indexing gives 30 of 100 marks to downstream exposure, since risk lies where hazard meets exposure.
• The ₹150 crore National Glacial Lake Outburst Flood Risk Mitigation Programme covers four States.

South Lhonak, 2023

• The flood destroyed the Teesta-III dam, though a 2019 modelling study had flagged the valley as at serious risk.

Warning is not enough

• In worst case models, a flood triggered by an avalanche in Tibet reaches the Nepal border in about 30 minutes, so warning needs land use zoning and local capacity too.
• Evacuation on signs of slope instability kept deaths in the 2025 Blatten, Switzerland, avalanche to one, against over 200 in the 2021 Chamoli ice and rock avalanche.

For the exam

• Prelims: NRSC works under ISRO, and the Defence Geoinformatics Research Establishment under DRDO.
• Mains, GS3: monitoring saves lives only when tied to thresholds, clear responsibility and evacuation plans.
• Mains, GS2: most mapped lakes lie outside India, so data sharing with China and Nepal is part of the warning system.

The mission

• Also called GISAT-1A, it images areas of interest at frequent intervals for disaster monitoring, agriculture and forestry.
• It replaces GISAT-1, lost in August 2021 when the cryogenic upper stage of its GSLV failed to ignite.

Orbits at a glance

The trade-off

• A low orbit satellite sees fine detail, but its revisit time runs to days.
• A geosynchronous satellite gives continuous imaging of a whole region, in coarser detail, and spends fuel on station keeping.
• Only a satellite in geostationary orbit appears fixed in the sky, while in other geosynchronous orbits it traces a path over the day.

For the exam

• Prelims: orbit altitudes and the geosynchronous and geostationary distinction.
• Mains, GS3: continuous imaging for floods, cyclones and forest fires, and ISRO's partnership with industry under Indian Space Policy 2023.

What the declaration commits to

CBAM, the flashpoint

• The EU's CBAM covers steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen, and entered its definitive phase in January 2026.
• Developing exporters, India among them, call it a trade barrier.
• The declaration calls such measures unilateral, punitive and discriminatory.
• The declaration's climate stand rests on CBDR-RC, a principle set in the 1992 UN climate convention.

At the summit

• Prime Minister Modi warned that the weaponisation of technology and critical minerals could hinder shared progress.
• President Xi announced a BRICS open-source AI community led by China.

BRICS in brief

• BRICS began as Brazil, Russia, India and China, and South Africa joined in 2010.
• Expansions in 2024 and 2025 took it to eleven members, Indonesia the latest.

For the exam

• Prelims: the new bodies and their full forms, RSSC, PABS, TCIM (Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine) and AGRIN.
• Mains, GS2: BRICS as a Global South voice, and India balancing between the West and China.
• Mains, GS3: CBAM as a trade and climate question, and energy security through critical mineral supply chains.

How traceable IST reaches a user

Who does what

• CSIR-NPL, India's National Metrology Institute, supplies the scientific basis and traceability.
• The Legal Metrology Department regulates and enforces, as it already does for shop weights and petrol pump gauges.

Why it matters

• Many systems took time indirectly from GPS or a telecom provider, sources that can differ by seconds or even minutes.
• Payments, power grids, telecom and data centres depend on accurate time stamps.
• SEBI has required stock exchanges since 2013 to synchronise their clocks with atomic clocks.
• CERT-In guidelines of 2023 recommend that government ICT systems synchronise with NPL and NIC, because tracing a cyber incident needs trustworthy time stamps.
• GPS is controlled by the United States, and its denial to India during the Kargil War led ISRO to build IRNSS, now NavIC.
• NavIC's time reference comes from CSIR-NPL.

Ways to receive IST and their accuracy

For the exam

• Prelims: CSIR-NPL keeps IST, the Legal Metrology Department enforces it and BIPM keeps Coordinated Universal Time.
• Mains, GS3: traceable time as critical national infrastructure, and a single foreign source such as GPS as a vulnerability.

How a chip is made

• India has many chip design engineers, but most work for multinational companies, so the designs and intellectual property belong elsewhere.
• Semicon 2.0 puts design first to turn that talent into Indian owned fabless companies.

The three chip design tracks

Capital support

• Every rate is below the uniform 50 per cent capital subsidy of the first phase.

The first phase so far

• Begun in 2021, the first phase approved 12 projects across six States, including Micron's assembly and test plant and a Tata Electronics wafer fab built with Taiwan's PSMC.
• Micron, Kaynes Semicon and CG Semi have started commercial production.

For the exam

• Prelims: the outlay, the support rates, C-DAC's role, and the terms fabless, foundry, ATMP/OSAT and compound semiconductor.
• Mains, GS3: whether a design first strategy suits India's design talent, and whether lower subsidies will still attract fabs.
• Mains, GS3: Indian owned IP for chips in critical infrastructure as supply chain security, and opening the commercial track to Overseas Citizens of India.

Who does what under Indian Space Policy 2023

ISRO's answer

• ISRO called the reforms ecosystem expansion, not privatisation, with industry or PSUs producing mature launch vehicles and routine satellites through competitive processes.
• ISRO keeps frontier research, human spaceflight, next generation launchers, deep space missions and strategic capabilities.
• Its targets include the Bharatiya Antariksh Station by 2035 and a crewed Moon mission by 2040.
• The dispute is over pace and what ISRO keeps, not over the policy, which set this direction in 2023.

Technology transfer so far

• IN-SPACe has invited private operators to run the small satellite launch complex at Kulasekarapattinam, Thoothukudi district, Tamil Nadu, raising questions of safety, liability and parliamentary accountability.

The two sides

For the exam

• Mains, GS3: a research agency plus a commercial launch market, weighing scale and jobs against lost revenue, talent drain and reliance on private launchers for strategic satellites.
• Mains, GS2: accountability to Parliament and the CAG when private firms run public assets.

NCAP results

• Launched in 2019, NCAP covers 130 cities, mostly non-attainment cities, and aims to cut PM10 by up to 40 per cent by 2025–26.
• Its performance linked grants of ₹16,423.55 crore since 2019–20, tracked on the PRANA portal, are 70.5 per cent used.

Swachh Vayu Survekshan 2026

• Begun in 2022–23, it ranks NCAP cities in three population groups on action against dust, waste burning, vehicles and industry.
• It rewards effort over results, as PM10 improvement carries only 2.5 per cent of the weightage.
• Lucknow topped the largest cities though its PM10 is over twice the annual standard of 60 micrograms per cubic metre.

From a reading to a response

• Carbon dioxide and methane are not among the eight AQI pollutants.
• The Central Pollution Control Board is statutory under the Water Act, 1974, and CAQM under its own Act of 2021.

Two ways to measure stubble burning

• Fire counts in Punjab and Haryana fell 93 and 91 per cent from 2021 to 2025, but burnt area fell far more slowly.
• Farm fires add no more than 15 per cent of winter particulate pollution, but more than a third on some October and November days.

For the exam

• Prelims: AQI pollutants, GRAP stages, particle sizes and the bodies' laws.
• Mains, GS3: is NCAP working if 108 of 130 cities improved but only 14 meet the standard?

Where consent comes from

• The Act does not use the language of consent for diverting forest land, and names the Ministry of Tribal Affairs as its nodal ministry.
• Guidelines under the Forest Conservation Act of 1980 require a no objection certificate from each gram sabha concerned, and this is what is called gram sabha consent.

FRA compliance inside forest clearance

How the dispute arose

• A parliamentary committee report of 3 August on NHPC found forest clearance took 106 months on average, and called consent from every gram sabha the most critical bottleneck.
• Citing the Teesta-IV hydroelectric project, where three of ten gram panchayats had not consented, it suggested a qualified super majority of 70 to 75 per cent.
• Critics cite the 2013 Niyamgiri judgment, where the Supreme Court let gram sabhas decide on bauxite mining in Odisha and they voted against it.

Forest rights recognised so far

For the exam

• Prelims: the gram sabha initiates the determination of forest rights, and Habitat rights belong to Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups.
• Prelims: the Act covers Scheduled Tribes in occupation of forest land before 13 December 2005, and Other traditional forest dwellers.
• Mains, GS2: consent as a safeguard for forest dwellers against the delay it adds to projects.

Great Indian Bustard

• Gujarat Action Plan for GIB Conservation: a minimum viable population of over 30 birds in Kachchh.
• The Critically Endangered Ardeotis nigriceps lives mainly in the Thar, including Desert National Park.
• Power line collisions are its best known threat.
• A Soft Release Centre, on grassland cleared of the invasive Prosopis juliflora, will acclimatise captive bred birds.

Project Cheetah

• Sites: Kuno National Park and Gandhi Sagar, with Banni Grassland and Nauradehi Wildlife Sanctuary to follow.

The science

• Nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, needed for clean energy, electric vehicles and computing, also lie on the deep ocean floor.

India's position

• India is the first nation to hold two sulphide exploration contracts, one on the Carlsberg Ridge in the Arabian Sea.
• The ₹4,077 crore Deep Ocean Mission funds the crawler trials and the Samudrayaan programme, whose Matsya6000 is designed to carry three people to 6,000 metres.

From contract to mining

• The ISA, set up under UNCLOS and based in Kingston, Jamaica, regulates mineral activity in the Area and grants exploration contracts.

The concerns

• Removing nodules destroys slow growing habitats that may take very long to recover.
• Sediment plumes and noise can spread damage well beyond the mined site.

For the exam

• Mains, GS3: seabed critical minerals to cut import dependence, and the blue economy.
• Mains, GS2: resource security against the common heritage principle under UNCLOS.

The science

• Human papillomavirus is a common sexually transmitted virus.
• Persistent infection with its high risk types causes almost all cervical cancers, most of them from types 16 and 18.
• Vaccinating girls before exposure prevents the cancer rather than treating it.
• WHO accepted in 2022 that one dose protects girls of this age about as well as two, which makes a one visit campaign workable.

Coverage so far

• Coverage is tracked district by district on the U-WIN platform.

The science

• Gram-negative bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa cause hospital infections of the lungs, urinary tract and bloodstream.
• Once they resist carbapenems, few effective medicines remain.

The findings

Why it matters

• More than 85 per cent of bloodstream infections were healthcare associated, pointing to spread inside hospitals and gaps in infection prevention and control, not just antibiotic overuse.
• Priorities are integrated surveillance, faster diagnostics, antimicrobial stewardship and access to newer antibiotics.

The dam

• Chinese analysts project about 60 GW, over three times the Three Gorges.
• Water may be diverted through a 40 km tunnel at the Great Bend.
• Little is public, so India cannot judge the effect downstream.

A weak framework

• There is no water treaty, and the Expert Level Mechanism is only consultative.
• India too shares data thinly with its downstream neighbours.

Why data matters

• More than 14,000 glacial lakes dot the Tibetan Plateau, growing fastest near China's southern borders.
• When a flood can reach a border in minutes, upstream data is part of the warning system.

Way forward

Models

The principle

• The Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at Rio in 1992, made fair benefit sharing one of its three objectives.

Who does what

Untraceable providers

• Seed companies paid for using vegetable seed bought in open markets, so no provider could be identified.
• The money went to State Biodiversity Boards and UT Biodiversity Councils by each State's crop area.
• Under Section 32(2), boards must spend it on conservation, People's Biodiversity Registers, Biodiversity Heritage Sites and community livelihoods.

The Minister's asks

• Turn People's Biodiversity Registers into dynamic planning instruments for local bodies.
• Align State rules with the Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023, which made most offences civil rather than criminal, and the 2024 Rules.

For the exam

• Prelims: the three tiers of the Act, and the role of Biodiversity Management Committees.
• Mains, GS3: ABS as conservation finance, and its limits when money stops at State boards instead of reaching communities.
• Mains, GS2: the real test of the Act is making 2.76 lakh committees work, not merely exist.

How it flooded

• Water from Nepal was not the main cause.
• Embankments cut rivers off from their floodplains.
• Many people live on diara, low riverine tracts within the river's reach.

The Farakka question

• The Farakka Barrage diverts Ganga water into the Bhagirathi–Hooghly to keep Kolkata port navigable.
• Bihar blames it for trapping silt, a contested claim.
• The 1996 India–Bangladesh Ganga Water Sharing Treaty on the lean season flow at Farakka expires in December 2026.

How thorium becomes fuel

The three-stage nuclear programme

• Homi J. Bhabha drew it up for India's modest uranium and large thorium reserves, much of it in coastal monazite.
• The 500 MWe Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam attained criticality in April 2026.

Kakodkar's case

• The PHWR fleet is large enough to irradiate thorium, a job first left to fast breeders.
• Thorium absorbs neutrons more strongly than uranium, so the fuel needs high burn-up to avoid raising uranium needs or costs.

Gaps and lessons

The debate

The agrivoltaics component

• Land ownership stays with the farmer.

PM-KUSUM so far

• The Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan, launched in 2019, supports decentralised solar plants, standalone solar pumps and the solarisation of grid connected agricultural pumps.

India's NDC targets

Measuring the sink

• FSI assesses forest and tree resources every two years and publishes the India State of Forest Report (ISFR).
• Forest cover includes plantations and orchards as well as natural forest, so common assessment standards matter.

Schemes the minister named

• The Green India Mission, MISHTI and Nagar Van Yojana, to support states.

The science

• Coal gasification is thermochemical, not biochemical.
• The scheme supports surface gasification of mined coal in a reactor above ground, not underground gasification of coal within the seam.

The scheme

Why it matters

• It aims at import substitution of LNG, urea, ammonia and methanol, worth about ₹2.77 lakh crore in 2024–25.
• Gasification is not low carbon, though its concentrated carbon dioxide stream is easier to capture than a power plant's flue gas.

Capacity and demand

The costs

• A 100 MW data centre uses about 2 million litres of water a day.
• Facilities are clustering in water stressed Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Telangana.
• State incentives do not require water disclosure or grid impact assessments.

Efficiency and policy

• The SHANTI Act, on nuclear energy, lets future Small Modular Reactors supply data centres.
• Data centres gained infrastructure status through the Harmonised List of Infrastructure in 2022-23.

The vote

• 164 in favour, including India, and only the United States against.
• The African Union backs the campaign, which says Mercator made Africa look small.
• India said the resolution authenticates no map and does not address boundaries.
• India's territory, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, must be shown as in its official map.

No flat map is true

• Every map projection distorts area, shape, distance or direction, and none keeps both shapes and areas true.

What each projection keeps

The summit

• Its four pillars: security and defence, space sector competitiveness, regulation of activities such as space debris, and science and exploration.
• India welcomed support for the International Telecommunication Union's framework for frequency management.

India's record

Partners

The science

• Mangroves are salt tolerant trees of the intertidal zone whose roots slow waves, trap sediment and shelter young fish.
• Guneri, Gujarat's first Biodiversity Heritage Site, has rare mangroves that grow inland, away from the sea.

The programme

• MISHTI (Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats & Tangible Incomes) was launched on World Environment Day 2023.
• It aims to restore about 540 sq km of mangroves through MGNREGS and CAMPA convergence.
• Avicennia marina dominates Gujarat's mangroves, mostly in the Gulf of Kachchh.

Gujarat's progress

The news

• India, with limited lithium reserves, has acquired five blocks in Argentina, seeks five more there, and is in talks with Australia and Chile.
• E-waste recycling could meet 25 to 30 per cent of India's critical minerals needs.

What Prelims tests

• KABIL (Khanij Bidesh India Ltd), a joint venture of NALCO, Hindustan Copper and MECL, secures minerals abroad.
• Argentina, Bolivia and Chile form the lithium triangle.

The news

• The Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre, Pinjore (Haryana), run with the Bombay Natural History Society, breeds White-rumped, Long-billed and Slender-billed vultures.

Status and threats

• All three are Critically Endangered, as is the Red-headed vulture, while the Egyptian vulture is Endangered.
• Diclofenac in cattle carcasses causes kidney failure in Gyps vultures.
• Veterinary diclofenac was banned in 2006, and aceclofenac and ketoprofen in 2023.
• Vulture Safe Zones keep drugs toxic to vultures out of an area.

The breakout

Where each stands

Also in the news

• India's Copyright Office refused to name the AI system DABUS as an author, since under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act the author of a computer generated work is the person who causes it to be created.
• OpenAI claims its agents solved the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, but the Clay Mathematics Institute still lists it as unsolved.

What industry wants

• Industry wants the Sovereign Green Bond Framework, which excludes nuclear, reviewed with the RBI's green deposits and SEBI's green debt securities frameworks.
• The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank are reviewing their limits on nuclear investment.

The hurdles

• The Central Electricity Authority flagged pending SHANTI Act rules, long gestation, site selection and scarce skilled manpower.

The debate

Where the carbon is

• Conserving soil organic carbon matters as much as conserving the trees.

Why value nature

• Mangroves shield coasts, breed fish and store carbon outside any market, so planning undervalues them.
• Natural Capital Accounting records natural assets and their depletion, which GDP misses.
• In 2024 the IUCN's Red List of Ecosystems found half the world's mangrove ecosystems at risk of collapse.

MoSPI's marine fish accounts

• MoSPI is testing these accounts under the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting.

The science

• Unlike solar and wind, geothermal power is available round the clock.

The policy

• The National Policy on Geothermal Energy of 2025, with MNRE as nodal ministry, covers exploration, direct use, ground source heat pumps and repurposing abandoned oil and gas wells.

India's potential

India in numbers

CEPI and Ind-CEPI

• CEPI, launched in 2017, funds vaccines against emerging epidemic threats so that candidates are ready before an outbreak.
• The Ind-CEPI Mission, implemented by BRIC-THSTI and BIRAC, delivered GEMCOVAC-19, India's first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
• Covishield is a viral vector vaccine, not an mRNA vaccine.

The science

• H1N1 is a subtype of influenza A, named for two surface proteins, haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).
• It caused the 2009 pandemic and now circulates as a seasonal strain.
• This season's vaccine matched H1N1, but uptake is low.

Where surveillance falls short

One Health

• Crowded, antibiotic dosed livestock farming drives antimicrobial resistance and spillover of pathogens to humans.
• Wastewater surveillance can give early warning of novel pathogens.

The textbook view

• In silicate weathering, freshly exposed silicate minerals react with CO2, and the carbon ends up locked in seafloor sediments.
• Silicate weathering is thought to have helped cool the planet over the last 50 million years.

The hidden source

The findings

• Steep mountain catchments were net sources of CO2, while the flatter floodplains downstream were sinks.
• This is the slow geological carbon cycle, working over millions of years rather than decades.

The news

• The Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow, under the Department of Science and Technology, reconstructed about 25,000 years of the Indian Summer Monsoon from a Bakhira Lake sediment core.
• Such long records from the Central Ganga Plain are scarce, and help separate natural monsoon variability from human induced change.

The lake

• Bakhira, in Uttar Pradesh, is an oxbow wetland formed when the Rapti cut off a meander, and a Ramsar Site.

Monsoon phases

What was cleared

Potential and target

• The scheme will incentivise States to prepare Detailed Project Reports, building a pipeline of projects.

Benefits and barriers

Context

• India has crossed 300 GW of installed non fossil fuel capacity.

The science

• Wetlands store floodwater, recharge groundwater, filter pollutants and hold large amounts of carbon, which is why they are called the kidneys of the landscape.

Ramsar basics

The forum

• Held since 2008, it is the highest level bilateral forum between India and Germany on environmental policy.

How V2V works

Deadlines

Why it matters

• India recorded 1.83 lakh road deaths in 2025.
• Concerns remain over location data security, band capacity and crashes caused by miscommunication.

The news

• Five young orangutans were found abandoned in Balasore, Odisha.
• The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, a statutory body, is investigating trafficking.

Prelims facts

• Orangutans live wild only in Borneo and Sumatra, and are Asia's only great apes.
• The Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutans are all Critically Endangered.
• All orangutans are in CITES Appendix I, which bars commercial trade.
• Exotic species like these fall under Schedule IV of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, added in 2022.

The news

• DRI operations seized leopard pelts, live Indian star tortoises, tokay geckos, pangolin scales and tiger bones.
• The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence works under the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, with the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau.

Protection status

• Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, which also lists leopards, gives the highest protection.

The shares

• The MoU ends a dispute over Sone water open since Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar in 2000.

What Prelims tests

• The Sone rises near Amarkantak, Madhya Pradesh, and joins the Ganga near Patna as a right bank tributary.
• It was settled by agreement, not by a tribunal under the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956, made under Article 262.

Why drylands matter

• Rainfed agriculture covers 43 per cent of India's net sown area and grows around 40 per cent of its food.
• Drylands are not wastelands, and need resilience built before droughts strike.

WDC-PMKSY in 12 years

• A proposed Watershed Portal, as digital public infrastructure, will track each project.

Design

• It is guided by the 3Cs: Community, Corporate Social Responsibility and Cost.
• In June 2026 it merged with Jal Shakti Abhiyan: Catch the Rain.

State models

The gap

• Structure counts measure effort, not outcome, so aquifer levels and demand side measures also need attention.

Farming fish on little water

India's fisheries

What Prelims tests

• Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY), launched in 2020 to build on the Blue Revolution scheme, supports RAS and biofloc units.

The news

• NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on 30 August to study dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets.
• It works from Lagrange Point 2, like the James Webb Space Telescope.
• Hubble, by contrast, orbits the Earth.

Instruments

What the universe is made of

The news

• Built by GRSE for NCPOR under the Deep Ocean Mission, a Ministry of Earth Sciences programme.
• It replaces ORV Sagar Kanya and can work in extreme seas, including the Southern Ocean.
• It will explore Indian Ocean mid-oceanic ridges for metal rich hydrothermal sulphide deposits.
• Launch is not commissioning: the hull is floated out so construction can continue.

Tools on board

Launch to commissioning

The platform

• BHASHINI (Bhasha Interface for India) is run by the Digital India BHASHINI Division under the Digital India Corporation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
• BhashaDaan crowdsources speech, text and image data from citizens.
• Shrutlekh gives real time translation and transcription.

Its reach

The news

• Its international workshop, BHASHINI SANGAM, was held in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Maharashtra discussed a proposed MahaBHASHINI.

The science

• Quantum entanglement, the resource behind quantum computing and communication, weakens through decoherence as particles decay from an excited to the ground state.
• Entanglement sudden death is its complete loss at a finite time, well before the decay is over.

The experiment

The science

• A thermoelectric material turns a temperature difference directly into electricity through the Seebeck effect.
• It must conduct electricity well but heat poorly.

The finding

• JNCASR found that in thallium copper selenide (TlCu₅Se₃), heat travels mainly in a wave-like way rather than as phonons (lattice vibrations).
• Its ultralow lattice thermal conductivity and zT of 1.7 suit it to recovering industrial waste heat.

The science

• Sunlight can split water into hydrogen and oxygen if a photocatalyst absorbs the light and separates the charges before they recombine.
• Most photocatalysts use inorganic semiconductors or precious metals, which are costly and hard to make.
• Photocatalysis is a route to green hydrogen besides electrolysis.

The news

• The Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS), Bengaluru, made an organic photocatalyst that uses no metal.

The news

• Neha Sinha's book Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi draws ecology lessons from the city.
• Restoration at the Aravalli Biodiversity Park began by matching native plants to baking sun, desert winds or the shelter of rocks.

What Prelims tests

Why a universal vaccine

• The bacterium causes pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis when immunity weakens.

Three kinds of vaccine

Two routes

India's steel

• India's steel emissions are about 32 per cent above the global average.

Carbon lock-in

• New BF-BOF plants could become stranded assets, like thermal power plants.
• The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism penalises carbon intensive steel exports.

Key facts

• INS Nipun is the second Nistar class diving support vessel, after INS Nistar, both from Hindustan Shipyard Limited.
• It supports saturation diving, and its hyperbaric lifeboat evacuates divers still under pressure.
• It is mother ship to the Navy's Deep Submergence Rescue Vessel, which rescues the crew of a disabled submarine.

The news

• Lumpy skin disease, a viral disease of cattle and buffaloes, has been reported sporadically since July 2026, mainly in young and unvaccinated animals.
• Over 36 crore cattle have been vaccinated or revaccinated.

The disease at a glance

For Prelims

• India's first cases were recorded in West Bengal and Odisha in 2019.
• Lumpi-ProVacInd, the indigenous vaccine, was co-developed by ICAR's National Research Centre on Equines, Hisar.

Dark patterns

• The Central Consumer Protection Authority issued guidelines on them in 2023.
• They name false urgency, basket sneaking, confirm shaming, subscription traps and drip pricing.

What platforms must do

The news

• The Department of Land Resources launched guidelines for the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP) 3.0, running 2026 to 2031.
• DILRMP 3.0 is a Central Sector Scheme.

Roads from waste

Why it matters

• Both cut the quarrying of natural aggregate and the use of bitumen, a circular economy approach.
• Steel slag can also be used in road bases, soil improvement and cement production.

Constitutional basis

How it can work

• Fold climate priorities into the Gram Panchayat Development Plan.
• Fund them through schemes such as the rural employment guarantee.

Challenges and way forward

The science

• A piezoelectric material, such as quartz, turns mechanical force into electrical charge.
• The effect needs a non-centrosymmetric structure, with no centre of symmetry, so molecular dipoles line up instead of cancelling.

The discovery

• CeNS, Bengaluru, used peptides, the biodegradable, tissue compatible building blocks of proteins.
• Possible uses include implantable sensors, electronic skin and wearables powered by heartbeat or walking.

The news

• The Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, jammed soft microgels into a glass: solid, yet disordered like a liquid.
• A sudden thermal shock briefly made them liquid like, erasing their memory of past heating and cooling.

Drug delivery

Facts

• Microgels absorb 300 to 500 times their weight in water and are used in diapers and sanitary napkins.
• RRI is an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology.

The science

• Fluorosis results from long term intake of excess fluoride, mostly in drinking water.
• India's groundwater fluoride is largely geogenic, from rocks, so the fix is safe water and defluoridation.

Two forms

Limits and fixes

• NEERI's Nalgonda technique is a low cost community defluoridation method.

The idea

• A circular economy reuses, refurbishes and recycles materials instead of discarding them.

The stakes

The forum

• It is organised by the Central Pollution Control Board with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.

Mains angles

The news

• The International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA) and the Asian Development Bank signed an MoU at a tiger landscapes workshop organised with the National Tiger Conservation Authority.
• It framed tiger landscapes as natural capital needing integrated landscape management.

What Prelims tests

One grid, many roles

The case and the counterpoints

• Energy security needs integrated planning across generation, fuel supply, transmission, storage and demand.
• The piece makes a case for organising government around outcomes rather than inputs.

Why it matters

• Urban mining recovers metals and critical minerals from discarded electronics, cutting virgin mining and import dependence.

Two balance sheets

The proposals

• Life cycle costing and value based procurement.
• Extended Producer Responsibility that rewards traceability and recovery efficiency, not the cheapest certificate.

The news

• Machine learning on recordings of over 3,000 passerine species from Xeno-canto, a citizen science audio library, found eight basic motifs.
• They are three trills, three whistles, atonal chaotic notes and harmonic stacks.
• Evolutionary history mostly decides which motifs a bird uses.

What shapes a song

The news

• India has no official census or national action plan for the striped hyena.
• Some 1,000 to 3,000 live in India.

What Prelims tests

• Hyaena hyaena is the only hyena in India, unlike the African spotted hyena.
• A mostly nocturnal scavenger of carrion, it removes sources of pathogens.
• It is protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.

The science

• Slumping: soft corals sag and collapse when a change around them disrupts their internal fluid pressure.
• Slumping is not coral bleaching, the loss of symbiotic algae, though heat stress can drive both.

The news

• Soft corals off Jeju, South Korea, a UNESCO recognised habitat, are slumping again after two years of rising temperatures.
• Triggers are high water temperature, typhoons, heavy rain and lower salinity from Yangtze River outflow.

The news

• The Master Plan for Delhi 2047 plans rivers, forests, wetlands and parks as one green-blue network against heat, extreme rain, water stress and poor air.
• The Delhi Ridge is an extension of the Aravalli range, among the world's oldest fold mountains.
• Bioremediation uses microorganisms or plants to break down or remove pollutants.

Disputes left unsettled

Linking adds conflict

• Receiving regions may demand transferred water even in distress years, depriving original users.

The alternative

• Demand side management: conserve water, reward farmers for efficient use, and curb groundwater extraction driven by free farm electricity.

The news

• AstroRad, a vest by Israel's StemRad, flew on NASA's uncrewed Artemis I Moon mission after trials on the International Space Station.

The science

• Hydrogen rich polymers stop energetic particles better for their weight than lead, as hydrogen nuclei are close in mass to incoming protons.
• The vest shields against particles from the Sun but not galactic cosmic rays from outside the solar system.

Dose cut in past solar storms

The news

• Scientists have found, for the first time, a ten sided wave around Saturn's south pole.
• The decagon may be formed by unstable winds or a nearby anticyclone.
• An anticyclone is a high pressure system.
• On Earth, an anticyclone's winds turn clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anticlockwise in the southern.

Saturn's two polar waves

The study

• It looks at millisecond pulsars and white dwarfs, dense remains of dead stars.
• Fed by dark matter, black holes born at about 40 tonnes can overcome Hawking radiation.
• Many such stars have survived billions of years, which rules out dark matter that would destroy them sooner.

The news

• The Technology Development Board (TDB) is funding commercial 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, of patient specific calcium phosphate bone grafts.

What Prelims tests

• Hydroxyapatite, the calcium phosphate mineral of most bone and tooth enamel, and beta-tricalcium phosphate are bioceramics used in grafts.
• The TDB is a statutory body under the Technology Development Board Act, 1995.

Two printing routes

The news

• The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) released an Indian Pharmacopoeia Reference Substance (IPRS) for enoxaparin sodium bioassays.

The science

• Biological medicines such as heparins cannot be fully characterised chemically, so bioassays against a reference substance measure their strength.
• Enoxaparin sodium is a low molecular weight heparin, an anticoagulant used against thromboembolic disorders.

The IPC

The science

• ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a 7 bit code for 128 characters.
• Unicode extends ASCII to the world's scripts, and its first 128 characters match ASCII.
• Unicode's tag characters mirror ASCII but are nearly invisible, though software still reads them.

ASCII smuggling

• It hides text in tag characters, first to slip instructions to AI agents in prompt injection attacks.

The science

• Photonics generates, guides and detects light particles, photons, as electronics handles electrons.
• Optical fibres carry light by total internal reflection, as the core's refractive index exceeds the cladding's.
• An optical transceiver converts electrical signals to light and back.

The news

• Indian firms have formed the India Photonics Association, which says many components are still imported.
• Under Semicon 2.0, photonics fabs are eligible for up to 35 per cent capital support.

The news

• Certain peptides stayed stable for weeks in 98 per cent sulphuric acid, the first biological macromolecule shown to survive it.

The science

• Strong acids normally break peptide bonds by hydrolysis, but concentrated sulphuric acid has almost no water.
• Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy showed them folding into an omega loop rather than helices or sheets.
• Venus has clouds of concentrated sulphuric acid, which may not be too harsh for complex chemistry.

The golden fibre

• India is the largest producer of raw jute and makes about 75 per cent of world jute goods.

The technology

• Jute geotextile, a biodegradable technical textile, protects embankment and riverbank slopes and helps plants establish on degraded land.
• The Jute Crop Information System, from ISRO's National Remote Sensing Centre, monitors cultivation via the BHUVAN JUMP app and PATSAN web platform.

The law

• Bamboo is botanically a grass, not a tree.
• In 2017 bamboo was removed from the definition of a tree under the Indian Forest Act, 1927, so bamboo on non forest land needs no permit to fell or transport.
• Bamboo in forest areas remains regulated.
• Under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, bamboo is a minor forest produce owned by forest dwellers.

From craft to enterprise

The science

• A Doppler Weather Radar reads echoes from raindrops, snow and hail.
• The Doppler effect, a shift in echo frequency, gives their speed towards or away from the radar.
• It tracks cloudbursts and storms as they develop.

The news

• Mountains cause beam blockage, cutting off the radar's view, which makes siting hard.
• Mausamgram gives India Meteorological Department forecasts at Gram Panchayat level.