UPSC Darpan

Daily edition13 study cards

UPSC Current Affairs — 12 October 2026

The Hindu (Mumbai), The Indian Express (Delhi) & The Economic Times (Delhi) — 12 October 2026

हिंदी संस्करण

Polity & Governance

Today’s three stories share one problem: a right or a reform exists on paper, but the machinery that makes it work does not. The data protection law has no working regulator, the RTI Act’s promise of proactive disclosure is kept by barely three in five public authorities, and delimitation waits on a constitutional amendment that could not find its majority. In each case the courts, the auditors or the arithmetic of Parliament are now forcing the question.

Economy

Both stories are about what India sells to the world and on whose terms. The draft steel policy wants nearly three times today’s capacity by 2047 and cleaner steel at the same time, and its weak points are imported coking coal and Europe’s carbon tax. The China exercise is smaller but sharper: India’s strength is services, and rules on data, licences and visas, not tariffs, keep it out of a vast market.

Agriculture & Food

India grows too much rice and too few pulses, and the reason is not farmers’ habit but the incentives the State has built around paddy. A year into the Pulses Mission, imports are falling, but the hardest acres, Punjab and Haryana’s paddy belt, will move only when pulses pay as surely as rice. The useful idea today is to pay for that shift, and to let the same fields earn from the sun.

International Relations

Both stories are about who holds power over a shared space. On the Ganga, a 30-year treaty ends its term in December, and Dhaka wants water judged with power, trade and people, not alone. In Pakistan, Islamabad has taken over its only Opposition-run province. India should read the first as a federal test at home and the second as a warning on its western flank.

Environment & Ecology

Recovery is now a matter of moving animals, not only guarding them. Eight wild buffaloes have travelled from Assam to bring a lost species back to Madhya Pradesh, and the test is not the release but whether the herd breeds and stays.

Science & Technology

Technology meets the ground in both stories. A satellite built with France will measure how thirsty India’s fields are from space, while in Rewa a nuclear project has stalled at the first borehole because villagers say they never agreed. Hardware is the easier half; trust and use are the harder one.

Society

Both stories today are about who gets counted, and by which yardstick. Mizoram will count refugees from three conflicts on a separate Census list, in a country that has no refugee law and leaves such people to executive practice. Jammu and Kashmir’s EWS certificates show how a rule copied from the Centre can measure poverty in a way that misses the poor of one region.