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UPSC Current Affairs — 15 October 2026

The Indian Express (Delhi Edition) — 15 October 2026

हिंदी संस्करण

Polity & Governance

Three courts, three gaps the executive left open. The Supreme Court closed the hole that a digital-first insurance scheme had cut around the counter passenger and told the Railway Board it would answer for the rest; the same court cut down a police demand for a journalist's data as more than any investigation needed; and the Allahabad High Court refused to let a pending commission report postpone Uttar Pradesh's panchayat vote. In each, the question is who acts when the duty-bearer waits.

Economy

Both stories today are about who buys India and who India buys from. A Canadian holding company takes control of a bank the State built in 1964, under rules the RBI wrote so that no owner can hold a bank hostage. In the gas market, the Hormuz blockade has rewritten India's supplier list, with Oman and Nigeria filling the gap Qatar left. In each case the question is security through diversification, and its price.

Agriculture & Food

Two kinds of farmer today. One is the Maharashtra cultivator who lost a kharif to a failed monsoon and will get ₹5,000 before Diwali because the Centre's drought machinery cannot pay in time. The other is one man in Wayanad who, on three acres, kept 55 rice varieties alive that the seed market had written off. Relief keeps a farmer going for a season; seeds kept by farmers keep agriculture going for centuries.

International Relations

Washington is doing two things to India at once: pulling it into a coalition against Chinese overcapacity and keeping it under the threat of its own tariff law. Delhi’s answer, visible in the trade talks, in Rubio’s coming visit and in the speed of the Canada reset, is to keep every door open and sign nothing that closes one.

Environment & Ecology

The treaty that saved the ozone layer is now being asked to cool the planet, and India is where that ask bites hardest. Every new air-conditioner sold in a hotter summer is both the problem and the market, and the Kigali schedule gives India until 2028 to decide which it will be.

Science & Technology

The phone in your pocket runs on chips India does not make. DRDO’s scientists said this week that the gap is not a trade problem but a war-fighting one: by 2047 India must own some part of the semiconductor chain, from materials up, or fight with borrowed hardware.

Internal Security

Two stories about the machinery behind the uniform. One is a siren a text message can switch on — the Centre’s answer to states that bought sirens in a panic after Operation Sindoor. The other is a missile-parts tender a defence PSU gave, without competition, to a company its former chief set up. Both ask: who sets the specification, and who checks it.