UPSC Darpan

Daily edition13 study cards

UPSC Current Affairs — 3 October 2026

The Hindu, The Indian Express & The Economic Times (Delhi Editions) — 3 October 2026

हिंदी संस्करण

Polity & Governance

All three stories are about who gets to decide, and in what order. Gujarat has turned the Directive Principle of a uniform civil code into a State law with the President’s assent, so the question is no longer whether but how many codes India will have. The Centre has built a commission to appoint tribunal members only after the Supreme Court refused to let ministries do it themselves. And the Supreme Court has declined to sit with a parliamentary committee on a Bill it may one day have to judge, a small decision that states the separation of powers more clearly than any textbook.

Economy

Both stories today are about the State reading the economy more finely before it acts. The RBI’s $38 billion fall in reserves is not a crisis but the bill for a swap it designed in June, and the number that matters is the forward book, not the headline. MoSPI’s first district map of informal enterprises makes the same point for the real economy: one national scheme cannot fit Murshidabad’s beedi rollers and Rangareddy’s jewellers.

Agriculture & Food

Indian agriculture is increasingly worked by women and still owned by men, and a drought exposes the gap faster than any survey. Maharashtra’s Woman Farmer Certificates are a real break from the rule that only a land title makes a farmer, but relief that ignores water-carrying, lost wages and small loans will leave the certificate a paper honour.

International Relations

Today’s three stories are about options, and who controls them. India has turned four years of being called a fence-sitter on Ukraine into a seat at the peace table, because it kept talking to both sides. On trade and oil Washington holds the levers, and India’s answer is not defiance but more choices: WTO rules to argue from, and Gulf barrels that make Russian crude a preference rather than a dependence.

Environment & Ecology

Both stories today are about repairing damage after the fact, and both show that repair is costlier and less certain than prevention. The Environment Ministry is now clearing projects that were built without the approval the law demands first, and the Great Indian Bustard is being returned to a desert that power lines and lost grassland had emptied of it. A State that waits for the harm and then pays to undo it has chosen the expensive path.

Health & Life Sciences

Medicine built on other populations’ data can mismeasure Indian patients. A Hyderabad laboratory has rebuilt the yardstick for sickle cell anaemia from Indian children’s records, and made a version that needs no laboratory at all. For a disease concentrated in tribal districts with few laboratories, that second feature may matter more than the first.

Internal Security

In Manipur the Centre is now using silence as policy: it has neither renewed nor ended its truce with Kuki-Zo armed groups, and is sending more troops instead. A pause gives leverage to demand weapons, but it also leaves thousands of armed cadres in a legal limbo. Meanwhile the State is learning that the dead are not its only obligation; the missing are too.