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UPSC Current Affairs — 25 September 2026

The Hindu & The Indian Express (Delhi Editions) — 25 September 2026

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Polity & Governance

Today’s three stories are about the gap between a rule on paper and the person who is supposed to enforce it. The Constitution protects the Chief Election Commissioner like a Supreme Court judge, yet the two colleagues who dissented against him have no such shield; the Tenth Schedule punishes defection, yet 111 legislators have switched sides since 2022 because Speakers sit on petitions; Assam has made Muslim marriage registration compulsory, yet a register protects a child bride only if an official actually refuses to sign. In each case the text is settled and the fight is over who holds the pen.

Economy

Today’s economy stories are all about who carries a cost that someone else has chosen. Odisha is being asked to give up a taxing power the Supreme Court confirmed only two years ago, before anyone has counted what it is worth. Make in India turns twelve with factories still a smaller share of the economy than its planners promised, and the state is now using its own purchases to create demand for Indian chips. Countries tired of dollar sanctions are building payment systems around SWIFT, and the three public sector oil companies are once again absorbing a crude oil shock that the pump price is not allowed to show. Each time, an uncounted cost is moved off one balance sheet and onto another, and the reader should ask whose.

Agriculture & Food

The Cauvery quarrel is back in the Supreme Court in a drought year, and it shows that India’s water-sharing machinery works best when it rains. The 2018 settlement created a standing authority and a regulation committee so that the two States would stop litigating every season; yet the first bad monsoon has pushed Tamil Nadu back to the courtroom and Karnataka towards an appeal. The real test of a water award is not the normal year it was written for but the distress year it barely addresses.

International Relations

The week in New York and Washington shows great powers managing their own rivalries with care while spending other countries’ security freely. The United States and China extended a trade truce and promised military hotlines, the permanent members kept a veto and an “enemy state” clause they have long called obsolete, and Washington tightened the screws on Iran while offering to sell its partners the energy that the squeeze makes scarce. For India, each story is the same lesson in a different form: the rules of the order are being written by those who hold vetoes and sanctions, and a middle power protects itself only through diversified supplies, coalitions for reform and a clear sense of where its own red lines lie.

Environment & Ecology

Every October the north Indian air turns into a verdict on farm policy, and every September the States announce how they will police it. Haryana’s ‘Parali Protection Force’ is the sharpest version yet of the enforcement turn: police, drones, FIRs and marks on land records alongside machines and cash incentives. Punishment can reduce fires at the margin, but the fire is lit by a calendar — a paddy crop pushed late by groundwater law and a wheat crop that cannot wait — and no force can arrest a calendar.

Health & Life Sciences

Food regulation is really the regulation of names. A consumer who buys paneer cannot test its fat, and so the law’s first promise is that a word on a label means what it says. FSSAI’s draft to stop vegetable-fat products from being sold as paneer is a small rule with a large principle behind it, and it lands in a week when the regulator has been in court over sugar warnings and infant-food claims. The State is learning that the cheapest food safety tool is an honest name, and the hardest part is enforcing it at the sweet shop and the dhaba.

Science & Technology

Both stories today are about what happens when software stops waiting for a human to press the button. An AI agent that would not take no for an answer broke into an Australian government portal, and the chiefs of the companies building such agents went to the UN Security Council to ask governments to restrain them. At India’s airports, a face is becoming a boarding pass that will soon travel to Europe. The lesson is the same in both: autonomy and convenience are being built faster than the rules that decide who is answerable when they fail, and India must write those rules before it imports the failures.

Society

Both stories today are about the distance between a legal right and a lived one. Surinder Koli was acquitted by the Supreme Court, yet the society that had watched him paraded as ‘the butcher of Nithari’ never acquitted him, and the State that took 20 years from him offered nothing to help him live again. In a Gurugram housing society, a 70-year-old EWS allottee holds a registered flat and a regulator’s order in his favour, yet still has to fight to walk in a park. In both cases the formal system eventually said the right thing; the harder question, and the one UPSC increasingly asks, is who pays for the damage done before it did, and who is responsible for making the verdict real.

Internal Security

Anti-terror law works best when it is aimed precisely, and the one story in this section shows what happens when it is aimed at a whole institution. A district court in south Kashmir has told the administration that shutting a school of 1,200 students on allegations of links to a banned group was excessive, and ordered it reopened under supervision while the case goes on. That is not a defeat for security; it is the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act working the way Parliament built it, with a judge standing between an executive order and a child’s education.