Current Affairs – July 14, 2026

{GS1 – Geo} Mineral Royalty Calculation Framework **

Context (BS): Supreme Court of India upheld the Union Government’s mineral royalty calculation framework under the MMDR Act, 1957.

Rationale: Prevents an estimated 15% to 17% decline in mining revenues for states, and reinforces lawful anti-evasion measures and the 2024 MADA v. SAIL ruling (royalty is not a tax and states can levy separate taxes on mineral-bearing lands).

Royalty Calculation under the MMDR Act

The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957 requires miners to pay ad valorem royalty to states based on the Average Sale Price (ASP).
The Minerals Concession Rules, 2016 require the ASP to include royalty, District Mineral Foundation (DMF) contributions and National Mineral Exploration Trust (NMET) payments.
The inclusive royalty formula curbs under-invoicing, price manipulation, and artificial revenue leakage by private mineral leaseholders.

District Mineral Foundation (DMF): Non-profit trust established under Section 9B of MMDR Amendment Act, 2015, funded through mandatory contributions from mining leaseholders, to implement Pradhan Mantri Khanij Kshetra Kalyan Yojana for the welfare of mining-affected communities and ecological restoration.
National Mineral Exploration Trust (NMET): A non-profit body established under the MMDR (Amendment) Act, 2015, funded by a 2% royalty contribution from mining leaseholders, to finance and coordinate mineral exploration, particularly of strategic and critical minerals.

Key Challenges Associated with the Framework

Cascading Levy: The inclusive Average Sale Price creates a ‘royalty-on-royalty’ effect by taxing values already containing royalty, DMF, and NMET payments.
Competitive Burden: It raises India’s effective mining tax burden to 60–65%, reducing global competitiveness against global mining hubs like Australia (~30–40%) or Chile.
Downstream Inflation: Higher mineral extraction costs increase input prices for steel, aluminium, cement, power generation, and other mineral-dependent industries.
Small-Miner Stress: Smaller leaseholders face severe margin and cash-flow pressures, increasing risks of operational closures and local employment losses.

{GS1 – IS} Gendered Wealth Inequality in India **

Context (IE): Measuring gender inequality by earnings alone masks the deeper wealth and asset gap, entrenching women’s economic dependence and understating the true extent of gendered inequality.

Landscape of Gendered Wealth Inequality in India

Title Deficit: Indian women form over 42% of the agricultural workforce (PLFS 2024) yet own land in only 12-16% of rural landowning households.
Income Asymmetry: Indian women earn 76% of men’s wages in salaried jobs and only 36% of men’s earnings in the self-employed sector.
Informal Concentration: Over 86% of female workers are classified as informal, without adequate access to written job contracts or paid leave (PLFS 2023-24).
Care Asymmetry: Indian women spend eight times more hours on unpaid care work than men, far exceeding the global average multiplier of three.
Employment Quality: India’s female labour force participation rose to 41.7% (PLFS 2023-24), driven largely by unpaid and low-productivity work rather than by regular wage employment.

Factors Compounding India’s Gendered Wealth Inequality

Succession Bias: The patrilineal allocation of 83% of agricultural land to men nullifies the equal statutory co-parcenary rights of the Hindu Succession Act.
Collateral Trap: Institutional mandates requiring immovable property for commercial credit lock property-less female entrepreneurs strictly into microfinance thresholds.
Time-Wealth Drain: An eight-fold disproportionate unpaid care burden traps Indian women in informal survivalist employment without surplus capital for investment.
Asset Stripping: Recurrent rural economic shocks force the rapid liquidation of unhedged household gold and repeatedly reset female wealth accumulation to zero.
Digital Exclusion: The structural exclusion of 36.4% of Indian women from independent ownership of mobile phones (NFHS-6) impedes their integration into digital wealth platforms.

Consequences of Gendered Wealth Inequality in India

Yield Deficit: Unequal access to formal land titles and farm inputs reduces potential national agricultural output by up to 4%.
Growth Shortfall: Restricted female participation in commercial capital markets denies the Indian economy an estimated $770 billion in potential GDP growth.
Violence Exposure: Up to 49% of asset-less women experience domestic violence due to the absence of viable exit options, compared with just 7% among property-owning women.
Adaptation Barrier: Excluding unregistered female farmers from state-backed crop insurance and solar subsidies leads to an 8% wider income loss during extreme heat shocks.
Child Welfare: Maternal asset ownership in the Global South improves child survival, health, and education outcomes more than paternal ownership alone.
Retirement Destitution: A lifelong exclusion from asset and pension accumulation forces over 70% of elderly Indian women into absolute economic dependence on relatives.

Read More> Gender Inequality in India

{GS2 – Governance} OTT Regulation in India

Context (IE | TH): The removal of film ‘Satluj’ from an OTT platform has reignited debates over digital censorship, regulatory arbitrage, and OTT oversight in India.

About the Regulatory Framework

Over-The-Top (OTT) content operates under the IT Rules, 2021, without prior certification, unlike theatrical films that need approval from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).
The Rules establish a three-tier grievance redressal mechanism comprising platform self-regulation (under a uniform Code of Ethics), an industry self-regulating body, and final government oversight.
Content Blocking: Section 69A of the IT Act empowers the Union government to block digital content threatening sovereignty, national security, public order, or related interests. The IT Rules, 2009, require written reasons and permit pre-decisional hearings to be bypassed only during emergencies.
- The Supreme Court upheld Section 69A in Shreya Singhal v. UoI (2015) because its prescribed procedure contained adequate safeguards.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) administers intermediary compliance while the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) oversees ethical standards for content.
Criminal Liability: Digital content remains subject to Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and POCSO Act provisions against obscenity and unlawful sexual material.

Key Challenges

Constitutional Tension: Vague content-removal criteria enable executive overreach and undermine artistic freedom protected under Article 19(1)(a).
Regulatory Ambiguity: Overlap between the operative IT Rules and proposed broadcasting laws creates uncertainty over definitions, jurisdiction, and compliance.
Piracy Amplification: Restrictions on politically sensitive content can trigger the Streisand effect and expand unauthorised circulation, mirror uploads, and illegal screenings.
Appellate Vacuum: FCAT’s abolition has shifted disputes to High Courts, increasing costs, delaying appeals, and removing specialised cinema expertise.
Algorithmic Misclassification: Large cross-border catalogues require automated filtering, which often fails to distinguish artistic context from actual illegality.

{GS3 – Envi} Version 2026-1 of the IUCN Red List *

Context (DTE): International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released the updated version 2026-1 of its Red List of Threatened Species.

IUCN Red List now covers 175,909 species, of which 49,505 (approximately 28%) are classified as threatened with extinction.
62% of endemic hydrothermal-vent molluscs (125 of 201 known species) face extinction from proposed deep-sea mining. Lirapex felix snail was listed as Critically Endangered following mineral exploration across its Indian Ocean habitat.
- More than 30 hydrothermal-vent molluscs remain classified as Least Concern within Marine Protected Areas where deep-sea mining is prohibited.
Five Australian marsupials were confirmed Extinct. The numbat was downlisted from Endangered to Near Threatened following predator control, captive breeding, fencing, and translocation.
The desert rain frog was uplisted from Near Threatened to Vulnerable due to diamond mining and energy projects in Namibia and South Africa.
About 95% of reassessed rowan, whitebeam, and service-tree species endemic to the UK and Ireland remain threatened. Wilmott’s whitebeam was uplisted to Critically Endangered.
Flowering plants were included under the EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) framework for the first time to prioritise threatened species with exceptional evolutionary distinctiveness.

IUCN Red List

IUCN Red List is the most comprehensive inventory of the global extinction risk of animal, plant, and fungal species, maintained by the Species Survival Commission.
It classifies species through five criteria: 1. Population reduction, 2. Geographic range, 3. Small population size and decline, 4. Very small or restricted population, and 5. Quantified extinction probability.
Species are placed in nine categories: Not Evaluated, Data Deficient, Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct in the Wild, and Extinct.
- Vulnerable, Endangered, and Critically Endangered collectively constitute the threatened categories under the Red List framework.
Each assessment considers conditions across a species’ entire global range rather than within a single country or region.

{GS3 – S&T} UN’s First Scientific Report on AI

Context (IE): The UN has released the Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, at the Global Dialogue on AI Governance held in Geneva.

Convened for the first time in Geneva, it serves as the official platform where all UN member states, alongside tech firms, academia, and civil society gather to establish rules for AI development.

Key Findings

AI Development is Outpacing Governance: AI capabilities are advancing much faster than scientific understanding, public oversight and regulatory frameworks. Waiting for complete scientific certainty before regulating AI could allow irreversible harms to emerge.
Fragmented Global AI Governance: Although several countries have adopted AI ethics principles and governance frameworks, existing regulations remain fragmented and inconsistent.
Rise of Frontier AI Models: Increasingly capable frontier AI models and autonomous AI agents can perform complex tasks with minimal human intervention, creating new governance and safety challenges.
Compute Divide: The US holds around 75% of global AI computing capacity, China around 15%, leaving just 10% for the rest of the world, which may struggle to build sovereign AI capabilities, shape global AI standards, or develop models suited to their own languages and developmental priorities.
Threat To Human Rights and Democracy: Concentrated AI capabilities could facilitate surveillance, misinformation, algorithmic bias, authoritarian misuse and weaken democratic accountability.

{Prelims – Envi} Mugger Crocodile *

Context (DTE): An NGT-appointed joint committee confirmed that the banned pesticide Aldrin caused several mugger crocodile deaths in the Chandraloi River in Kota district, Rajasthan.

The Chandraloi, also called Chandralohi, is a small perennial river and a right-bank tributary of the Chambal River, flowing entirely within Rajasthan’s Kota district.

Aldrin

Aldrin is a toxic synthetic organochlorine insecticide formerly used in agriculture before its global ban.
It is a non-biodegradable Persistent Organic Pollutant (POP). Its low water solubility and high fat solubility cause bioaccumulation in tissues and biomagnification across successive trophic levels.
India banned its manufacture, import, and use in the 1990s under the Insecticides Act, 1968; the POP Rules, 2018, regulate newly listed POPs under the Stockholm Convention.

About Mugger Crocodile (Crocodylus palustris)

The mugger (or marsh) crocodile is a medium-sized, broad-snouted freshwater crocodilian that is an apex predator in its aquatic ecosystems. Unlike most crocodilians, it digs extensive mud-bank burrows for shelter and temperature regulation during extreme weather.
Distribution: Inhabits marshes, lakes, rivers, and artificial ponds across the Indian subcontinent, mainly in India with smaller populations in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, and Iran.
Diet: Juveniles feed on insects and small fish, while adults prey on larger fish, birds, snakes, and mammals.
It is a keystone species that controls prey populations, recycles nutrients, and scavenges carcasses.
IUCN: Vulnerable; CITES: Appendix I; WPA: Schedule I.

{Prelims – IE} NIDAR 2.0

Context (PIB): Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in collaboration with Drone Federation India (DFI), launched the 2^nd edition of the National Innovation Challenge for Drone Application and Research (NIDAR 2.0) under the SwaYaan initiative.

The 1^st edition of NIDAR 2025-26 was launched in March 2025. It empowers India’s College Graduates to build collaborative autonomous drones for defined problem statements.

About SwaYaan

SwaYaan is a national initiative of the MeitY launched in 2022.
Aimed at developing a skilled workforce and strengthening India’s UAS Drone ecosystem. It supports the Government’s vision of making India a global drone hub by 2030.
- It focuses on capacity building for human resource development in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), including drones and related technologies.
Implementation: It is implemented through a hub-and-spoke model involving 30 premium institutions like IISc, IITs, IIITs, NITs, CDAC, and NIELIT.
5 Key Work Themes: Drone Electronics, GNC Algorithms Simulation, Aeromechanics, Drone Applications, and Allied UAS Technologies.

Read More> Drone Warfare in India

{Prelims – In News} Nemawashi

Context (TOI): Nemawashi (meaning “going around the roots“) is a Japanese tree-transplantation technique that prepares a mature tree’s root system before relocation, combining traditional horticulture with modern engineering to maximise survival.

Significance: Used for historically, culturally, or ecologically significant trees, it has also become a metaphor in Japanese business and politics for building consensus before major decisions and serves as a model for balancing infrastructure development with environmental conservation.

{Prelims – Polity} Four New Division Benches in Supreme Court

Context (IE): SC created 4 new benches, two for tackling oldest pending civil and other two for criminal cases to clear oldest pending cases.

These special benches will operate on “non-miscellaneous days” i.e., Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. (Mondays and Fridays are “miscellaneous days” reserved for fresh filings and preliminary hearings.)
SC currently has 96,045 pending cases with Civil matters standing at 74,244 cases, while criminal matters account for the remaining 21,801 (National Judicial Data Grid).
- The oldest civil case has been pending since 1986, while oldest criminal case was registered in 1991.
Cases intake has risen exponentially with increased accessibility through e-filing and virtual hearings.
- In 2025 alone, total number of cases filed reached an unprecedented 75,402.

Read More> Judicial Pendency in India

{Prelims – S&T} Earendil-1 Satellite

Context (TH): The U.S. has authorised a startup, to launch and operate Earendil-1, an experimental satellite designed to reflect sunlight onto selected locations on Earth during nighttime.

Earendil-1 is a non-geostationary satellite equipped with a large deployable thin-film mirror that can be steered to reflect sunlight toward specific areas on Earth.
The project aims to extend daylight hours for solar power generation and provide temporary illumination during emergencies, disaster response, and humanitarian operations.

{Prelims – WH} Bastille Day

Context (IE): French National Day, commonly known as Bastille Day, is celebrated every year on 14 July.

It commemorates the Storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789, an event that marked the beginning of the French Revolution and symbolized the end of absolute monarchy.
- Bastille prison was used to hold political prisoners as well as some prisoners awaiting trial.
Taking place over a period of 10 years, from 1789 to 1799, the French Revolution was a time of huge political, social and economic change. It saw the French monarchy overthrown, a republic established and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
France officially adopted 14 July as its National Day in 1880.

{Prelims – Misc} One Liners

S&T – Long March 10B (IE): China landed a reusable rocket, Long March 10B for the first time. Before China, only SpaceX and Blue Origin from USA demonstrated the ability to launch and land rockets.
- It can carry a payload of up to 16 metric tons to Low Earth orbit. A reusable rocket is one that can land on Earth after lifting off.
IR – Nagpur Ministerial Declaration (PIB): Adopted at the 3^rd BRICS Transport Ministers’ Meeting, under India’s 2026 BRICS Chairship, it establishes a collaborative, innovation-driven framework to deepen international cooperation in transport and logistics. It outlines a strategy to accelerate transport decarbonisation, integrate the circular economy in infrastructure, build resilient supply chains, advance the BRICS Railway Research Network, and promote Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) & Urban Mobility Hubs.
Sports – 56^th International Physics Olympiad 2026 (PIB): India shared the top rank with China, Kazakhstan, Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan. All five Indian participants won gold medals.
- It is an annual global physics competition for secondary-school students. The 56^th edition was hosted by Colombia in Bucaramanga.
A&C – Jodhpuri Mojari (IE): Centre awarded a GI tag to Jodhpur’s nearly 200-year-old Mojari craft.It is traditional handcrafted leather footwear (Jooti), primarily crafted by Jinagar (Jingar) community in Jodhpur, Rajasthan.
- The Jinagar community were historically royal saddle (jeen) and sword-scabbard makers who later shifted to shoemaking.