UPSC Darpan

Daily edition22 study cards

UPSC Current Affairs — 26 September 2026

The Hindu, The Indian Express & The Economic Times (Delhi Editions) — 26 September 2026

Download PDF (English) PDF (हिंदी) हिंदी संस्करण

Polity & Governance

Every story today is about who gets to decide, and on what terms. The Centre will decide how India’s first post-Independence caste count is classified, but has not said how; the Election Commission’s appointment and internal deliberation are being tested in court, in Parliament and in public; the President sits between West Bengal and a Central narcotics law; the Union holds back panchayat money over portal data; and an elected Jammu and Kashmir Assembly can only ask for the Statehood it once had. In each case the constitutional text is clear enough — what is missing is a transparent, time-bound process that the losing side can accept.

Economy

Today’s economy stories are about the state writing its rules for the capital, ideas and infrastructure it needs. The new model investment treaty decides how far a foreign investor may drag India before an arbitrator, and draws the line at taxation. The borrowing calendar and the RBI Bulletin show a government keeping its fiscal promise while an oil shock pushes up yields and prices. A trade secrets law would protect the know-how that start-ups live on, and the mega-port list and NHAI’s highway code decide how cheaply goods can move. In each case the hard part is setting the rule so that it guards the public interest without scaring off the investor.

Agriculture & Food

India enters a failed-monsoon year with more grain in its warehouses than at almost any time in its history, and two sets of economists read that fact in opposite directions. One says the stocks make export bans unnecessary; the other says stocks from last year’s harvest tell us nothing about next year’s. Both agree on the real problem: Indian food trade policy has been run by reflex, opening and shutting borders on the latest estimate. The case for rules over reflexes is the lesson of the day.

International Relations

All three stories today are about India trying to write rules in a system where the powerful ignore the rules that already exist. At sea, India is building a coalition of flag states and crew-supplying states because missiles are killing Indian sailors on ships that fly other countries’ flags. At the WTO, India has taken a seat as a third party in the first formal legal test of the EU’s carbon border tax, and it has done so while the EU’s green rules quietly cut Indian recyclers off from European scrap. In New York, the UN turned 81 looking, in The Hindu’s words, “overweight and weak”, and India’s realistic ambition has shrunk from a permanent seat to winning a two-year one against Tajikistan.

Environment & Ecology

Both stories today are about who pays for conserving a mountain range and who decides the price. In the Western Ghats, States are bargaining the protected area down, village by village, because the costs fall on their farmers while the benefits are national. In Arunachal Pradesh, a Central expert panel has accepted the loss of over 1.35 lakh trees for 1,605 MW of hydropower, with the replacement forest planned more than a thousand kilometres away. In both cases the clearance machinery works; what it does not yet do is measure the whole landscape before signing off on one piece of it.

Health & Life Sciences

India’s mental-health problem is not a shortage of ideas but a shortage of people and of places close to patients. The new BRICS network NIMHANS will coordinate is built on that premise: task-sharing with non-specialist workers, tele-consultation and treatment inside primary care, borrowed and adapted from partners who have faced the same gap. The value of the exercise will be judged at the primary health centre, not at the summit table.

Science & Technology

Both stories today are about who owns the design of a critical technology and what India must give up to get it. In nuclear power India has rewritten its liability law to bring foreign reactor vendors back to the table, and the French are now asking for a fleet order before they localise. In chips a university lab has shown a working graphics processor on reconfigurable hardware, while Indian phone buyers pay for the fact that the world’s memory chips are being diverted to AI data centres. Technology sovereignty is bought either with law, with orders or with patient design capability; India is trying all three at once.

Society

The most durable gender norms are not taught in lectures on equality; they are absorbed from pictures of who cooks, who fetches water and who plays the drums. Andhra Pradesh has decided to redraw those pictures for six- and seven-year-olds, splitting household chores equally between men and women in its new textbooks. It is a cheap, quiet reform aimed at the root of India’s unpaid care burden, and its success will depend less on the books than on the homes and classrooms that receive them.

Internal Security

The Northeast dominates today because two parallel tracks are running at once: the Centre is extending emergency military powers for another six months while offering the Nagas a political seat at the negotiating table. That is not a contradiction but the standard Indian formula of force plus talks, and its weakness is visible in Kamjong, where armed groups from Myanmar’s civil war cross an open border to kill villagers. The third story widens the lens from insurgency to deterrence: whether a nuclear doctrine written in 2003 still fits a world of two aligned nuclear neighbours and hypersonic weapons.