Current Affairs — 13 June 2026

📖 Explanation

Raj Narain was the Socialist candidate who lost the 1971 Lok Sabha election from Rae Bareli to Indira Gandhi and subsequently filed the election petition. Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court heard the case over nearly three years before delivering the landmark verdict. Jayaprakash Narayan was the broader leader of the anti-Emergency movement, while Morarji Desai and Charan Singh were prominent opposition leaders but not the petitioner in this specific case.

📖 Explanation

The Fertiliser (Control) Order (FCO) of 1985 is the central regulation governing the manufacture, import, and sale of fertilisers in India. No new product can reach the market without FCO registration, which currently involves submission of a technical dossier and mandatory field trials over at least two crop seasons. The Essential Commodities Act covers price and supply controls on several products including fertilisers, but registration itself is governed by the FCO.

📖 Explanation

IN-SPACe, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre, is the nodal body that administers the Technology Adoption Fund and regulates private participation in India's space sector. It works alongside ISRO but is a separate entity focused on enabling and approving commercial space activity. The TAF provides milestone-linked funding and technical guidance to help startups bridge the gap between research-stage technology and commercial deployment.

📖 Explanation

Among the three types of tropical atmospheric waves studied — Kelvin, Rossby and Mixed Rossby-Gravity — Rossby waves had the most powerful effect on extreme rainfall in the Western Ghats and Arabian Sea region. They work by organising deep rain clouds and drawing more moisture together, amplifying rainfall over land by 20 to 60 percent. The 2018 and 2019 Kerala floods were associated with strong Rossby wave activity. This finding is significant because Rossby waves can be tracked several days in advance, offering a window to improve early-warning systems.

📖 Explanation

The carbon budget refers to the total amount of greenhouse gases that can still be emitted while keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target set by the Paris Agreement. Scientific assessments indicate that at the current pace of emissions, this budget could run out in roughly three years. This warning comes even as 2025 saw a record milestone: solar, wind and hydropower together overtook fossil fuels as the world's leading electricity source. The gap persists because heavy industries like steel, cement and chemicals still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

📖 Explanation

With El Nino now active over the equatorial Pacific, India's meteorological agency has trimmed the 2026 southwest monsoon forecast to about 90 percent of the 50-year long-period average, which is classified as a below-normal monsoon. El Nino occurs when the central and eastern Pacific Ocean warms above normal, weakening trade winds and disrupting weather patterns globally. For India, El Nino years historically correlate with weaker monsoon seasons. The southwest monsoon delivers roughly three-quarters of India's annual rainfall, making the forecast significant for agriculture, water supply and electricity generation.

📖 Explanation

India's Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) fluctuates significantly because many discouraged job-seekers stop looking for work and are no longer counted as unemployed. When this happens, the unemployment rate can fall even though the underlying employment situation has worsened. The Employment Rate avoids this trap by using the entire working-age population (aged 15 and above) as the base, so it captures whether people are actually employed regardless of whether they are actively seeking work. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), conducted by the Ministry of Statistics, is the official source for these figures in India.

📖 Explanation

AI data centres require enormous quantities of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a specialised form of memory that allows AI chips to process data at very high speeds. Because HBM commands far higher profit margins, major manufacturers such as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron redirected production capacity — specifically silicon wafer fabrication — away from standard DRAM toward HBM. Since factory capacity is finite, this reallocation reduced the supply of ordinary DRAM used in smartphones and PCs, driving up prices steeply. For Indian consumers, where memory can constitute about 43% of the component cost of a budget phone, the impact on retail prices is direct.

📖 Explanation

India's power exchanges were designed primarily to balance short-term electricity surpluses and shortages, but over time their spot prices became reliable market signals for the state of power supply across the country — without displacing long-term power purchase agreements. The Coal Exchange Rules, 2026 adopt a similar philosophy: a regulated marketplace where coal producers and buyers can trade openly, enabling price discovery and giving smaller consumers easier access to supply. A key distinction noted in the rules is that coal, unlike electricity, is a physical commodity that must be delivered, and its quality varies by grade — making strong quality standards, clear contracts, and good logistics essential. The Coal Controller Organisation of India will frame the detailed operational rules.

📖 Explanation

The fitment factor is a multiplier used to convert an employee's existing basic pay into the new revised basic pay under a Pay Commission award. For example, a fitment factor of 2.57 — as used by the 7th CPC — means each employee's basic pay is multiplied by 2.57 to fix the new salary. It is one of the most closely watched figures when a Pay Commission submits its report, because it directly determines the quantum of salary revision for lakhs of central government employees and pensioners.

📖 Explanation

The protests in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir have been led by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a citizens' body comprising traders, professionals and civil-society activists. Pakistani authorities responded by banning the JAAC, announcing rewards for the arrest of some of its leaders, and charging them under serious provisions including terrorism and sedition. The protests, which left at least 15 people dead, centred on grievances such as high electricity bills, wheat shortages, underdevelopment, and a demand to abolish the 12 reserved Assembly seats filled by migrants settled elsewhere in Pakistan.

📖 Explanation

PM Modi's visit to the Slovak Republic in June 2026 is historic because it is the first-ever State Visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Slovakia since Slovakia became an independent country in 1993. During the visit, PM Modi held talks with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and met President Peter Pellegrini. The two sides focused on deepening cooperation in trade, investment, automobile manufacturing, and railway sector development, building on the momentum from Slovak President Pellegrini's visit to India for the AI Impact Summit in February 2026.

📖 Explanation

The Allahabad High Court dismissed twelve of the fourteen charges and upheld only two. The two upheld charges related to: (1) a former private secretary acting as an election agent before formally resigning from government service, and (2) state government officials using public resources to arrange facilities for campaign meetings. The violation of the Representation of the People Act on these narrow grounds was sufficient to void the election result.

📖 Explanation

India's fertiliser registration process currently takes more than 800 days, making it one of the slowest among comparable economies. The European Union and Japan take around 30 days, the United States around 90 days, and Vietnam just 15 days. The government is now considering exempting fertilisers that already meet quality and safety benchmarks from the mandatory multi-season field trials in order to cut this timeline significantly.

📖 Explanation

A study examining tropical atmospheric waves found that the catastrophic 2024 Wayanad landslides coincided with strong Kelvin wave activity. Kelvin waves are one of three types of tropical atmospheric waves — the others being Rossby and Mixed Rossby-Gravity waves — that influence rainfall patterns in the tropics. Unlike Rossby waves, which had the largest overall impact on extreme rainfall in the region, Kelvin waves were specifically linked to the Wayanad event. The study was supported by India's Ministry of Earth Sciences and involved researchers from the UK and France.