UPSC Current Affairs

UPI (Unified Payments Interface), developed by NPCI, processes over 10 billion transactions per month and is India's flagship digital payment infrastructure.

UPI has been expanded to over 20 countries including Singapore, UAE, France, UK, and several others for cross-border payments.

India became a full member of the SCO in 2017. The SCO is a Eurasian political, economic and security alliance. India hosted the SCO Summit virtually in 2023.

PM Narendra Modi visited Washington DC in February 2025 and held bilateral talks with President Trump, discussing defence, trade, and technology cooperation.

India's total renewable energy capacity surpassed 200 GW in 2025, on track towards its target of 500 GW by 2030.

Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE joined BRICS as full members, expanding the bloc significantly.

China had already demonstrated space docking before India's SpaDeX. India became the 4th country (after USA, Russia, China) to achieve this.

With SpaDeX's successful docking, India became the 4th country after USA, Russia, and China to demonstrate space docking technology.

Rekha Gupta was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Delhi after BJP won the February 2025 Delhi Assembly Elections, ending AAP's decade-long rule.

Maha Kumbh 2025 was held at Prayagraj (Triveni Sangam — confluence of Ganga, Yamuna, and mythical Saraswati), the largest religious gathering in the world.

India's G20 Presidency theme 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — One Earth, One Family, One Future' was drawn from the Maha Upanishad, reflecting inclusive development.

Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha), won the Nobel Peace Prize 2024 for its efforts towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

Sabyasachi Mukherjee of TIFR Mumbai was recognised twice in 2025 for his work in complex dynamics and connections between Mandelbrot sets and Kleinian groups. The Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar 2025 was announced on 26 October 2025 by the Ministry of Science and Technology (PIB PRID:2182615). The Infosys Prize 2025 was announced on 12 November 2025. Both recognitions cover the same body of mathematical research, from two entirely different institutions.

Nikhil Agarwal is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-director of Blueprint Labs. He received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Economics for developing empirical methods to study and improve allocation mechanisms — practical systems like school admission lotteries, medical residency matching, and kidney exchange programmes that need to match people to places or resources without using prices.

The conventional Haber-Bosch process produces ammonia (used in fertilisers feeding ~50% of the world) by reacting nitrogen with hydrogen at high temperature and pressure, using natural gas as both fuel and hydrogen source. Manthiram at Caltech developed electrochemical pathways — including lithium-mediated nitrogen reduction and oxygen-atom transfer catalysis — that use renewable electricity instead, at room temperature and pressure, reducing the process's carbon footprint.

Andrew Ollett of the University of Chicago is the world's leading scholar of Prakrit languages — the ancient South Asian spoken languages distinct from Sanskrit, including Pali, Ardhamagadhi, and Maharashtri. His work covers Prakrit grammar, the cultural history of why authors chose Prakrit over Sanskrit, and the circulation of Prakrit texts across the subcontinent. He is the first Prakrit language scholar to win the Infosys Prize Humanities category.

Sushant Sachdeva of the University of Toronto received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Engineering and Computer Science for his advances in mathematical optimisation, particularly developing near-linear-time algorithms for flow networks and linear programs. His results have been described as producing "absurdly fast" algorithms because they approach what theorists consider the theoretical limit of speed for these problems.

Anjana Badrinarayanan at NCBS Bengaluru received the Infosys Prize 2025 in Life Sciences for her work on DNA damage repair, particularly for discovering novel mitochondrial DNA damage response pathways. She is the only winner in the 2025 Infosys Prize cohort who is based in India.

FM Nirmala Sitharaman presented her 8th consecutive Union Budget on February 1, 2025, setting a world record for most consecutive budget presentations.

COP29 was held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2024. A key outcome was the New Collective Quantified Goal of $300 billion/year for climate finance.