UPSC Current Affairs 10 September 2026

• Founding Organization: BEDF was founded by the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), an apex body operating under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India.
• Legal Status: It is a non-profit society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860.
• Core Mandate: The foundation's primary objective is to strengthen the entire supply and export value chain of premium Basmati rice.

• Modipuram Center: BEDF operates a state-of-the-art laboratory and a Demonstration & Training Farm (D&T) at the SVP University of Agriculture and Technology campus in Modipuram, Meerut (Uttar Pradesh).
• Testing Capabilities: The facility specializes in DNA fingerprinting for rice variety identification and rigorous testing for pesticide residues, aflatoxins, and heavy metals.
• Official Authorization: The Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has designated BEDF as an authorized center to authenticate samples for export and customs.
• New Pilibhit Expansion: The new facility in Pilibhit will include an NABL-accredited testing lab, a seed unit, and a dedicated museum displaying 45 notified Basmati rice varieties to cater to neighbouring states like Uttarakhand.

• Seed Multiplication: BEDF produces high-quality breeder and foundation seeds directly at its farms and multiplies them via partnership fields to keep the seed supply chain strong.
• Farmer Capacity Training: The foundation has set a target to train over 50,000 farmers across seven key Basmati-producing states by the end of the 2025–26 cycle.
• Global Standard Compliance: It actively educates farmers on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and the judicious use of chemical pesticides to ensure Indian Basmati meets the stringent health standards of international buyers like the EU and USA.
• Geographical Indication (GI): BEDF supports the official registration, tracing, and global legal protection of Basmati rice as a unique Geographical Indication product from India.

• Definition: A systematic, ecosystem-driven approach designed to upgrade, train, and integrate Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) into major corporate and government supply chains.
• The Blueprint: It shifts small businesses from being temporary, transactional "small suppliers" into highly dependable, long-term "strategic business partners."
• Dual-Tier Execution Structure:
  • National Level VDPs: Lasting 3 days, these involve massive industrial exhibitions where central PSUs (like BHEL, BSNL, and IOCL) interact with hundreds of small enterprises.
  • State Level VDPs: Focussed, localized buyer-seller meets matching a state’s specific large-scale units with local MSMEs to clear regional supply deficits.

• Enforcing the 25% Procurement Mandate: Directly facilitates the Government of India’s Public Procurement Policy, which legally mandates Central Public Sector Undertakings (CPSUs) and government departments to source a minimum of 25% of their annual supplies from MSEs.
• Aggressive Import Substitution: Bridges the communication gap so local entrepreneurs can manufacture spare parts and sophisticated machinery components that were previously imported at immense costs.
• Capacity & Quality Standardization: Equips small vendors with modern technological tools, financial literacy, and the rigorous quality certifications required to hit global industry standards.
• Bridging Market Information Gaps: Resolves the systemic disconnect where large buyers cannot find capable local suppliers, and MSMEs remain unaware of upcoming public tenders or formal vendor registration rules.

• Ecosystem Win-Win: Large buyers secure highly reliable, low-cost, and agile localized supply loops, while small businesses lock in steady, high-volume, long-term contracts.
• Fostering Inclusion: Dedicated tracks within the VDP frame link SC/ST and women-owned businesses directly into high-tech defence, aerospace, and energy sector supply pipelines.
• Boosting Institutional Credit Access: Landing a formal vendor slot with a major PSU significantly strengthens an MSME’s balance sheet credibility, opening doors to easier banking credit and trade receivables discounting systems (TReDS).
• Local Employment Generation: Expanding the production capabilities of regional MSME clusters naturally triggers mass employment and distributed economic growth across Tier-2 and Tier-3 hubs.

• Single-App Experience: It integrates face authentication directly into native Android and iOS applications.
• No Extra App Needed: Previously, users had to download a separate background app called the FaceRD app. This SDK eliminates that requirement.
• Native Integration: A customer can now complete their KYC entirely within a single banking, insurance, or brokerage app.
• Advanced Security: It features built-in, AI/ML-driven liveness detection and anti-spoofing capabilities to block fraudulent attempts.
• Data Privacy: It ensures secure handling and high-level encryption of sensitive biometric data directly on consumer smartphones.

• Pre-Production Validation: It allows companies to test the complete face authentication journey before deploying it live to customers.
• No Hardware Required: Teams can test face capture and liveness checks without needing external biometric hardware devices.
• Simulating Failures: Developers can test how their apps handle real-world errors like network timeouts, connectivity drops, invalid digital signatures, and spoofing attacks.
• Journey Testing: Covers end-to-end stages including user provisioning, user consent, authentication, and response validation.

• Onboarding Playbook: Alongside these tools, UIDAI released a "Playbook on Ease of Onboarding" to act as a step-by-step guide for BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) entities.
• Massive Scale: The underlying indigenous AI/ML face tech (launched in 2021) has already completed over 500 crore transactions across nearly 200 entities.
• Daily Traffic: Aadhaar currently processes roughly 10 crore authentications per day, with plans underway to scale capacity up to 25–30 crore daily authentications.
• Primary Use Cases: Widely used for Pensioner Digital Life Certificates (Jeevan Pramaan), Ayushman Bharat onboarding, PM-Kisan, SIM activation, and gig-worker registration.

• Definition: It is a specific, highly common form of arteriosclerosis (the general hardening of the arteries).
• Plaque Composition: The built-up plaque is a sticky, progressive deposit composed of cholesterol, fats, cellular waste products, calcium, and fibrin (a clotting material).
• The Mechanism: When the inner lining of an artery gets damaged, cholesterol burrows beneath the lining, triggering chronic localized inflammation. A fibrous cap forms over it, but as it expands, it clogs the artery's open channel.

• High Cholesterol: Excess low-density lipoprotein (LDL or "bad" cholesterol) serves as the primary raw material for plaque.
• Hypertension (High Blood Pressure): The constant physical force of high pressure damages the delicate inner lining of the blood vessels.
• Smoking and Tobacco Use: Toxins inhaled from smoking damage vessel walls and drastically accelerate plaque hardening.
• Unmanaged Medical Conditions: Diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and obesity severely alter blood fat composition and accelerate arterial degradation.
• Age & Genetics: The biological risk naturally increases for men after age 45 and women after age 55, or if there is a direct family history of premature heart disease.

• Heart (coronary artery disease): Leads to severe chest pain (angina), shortness of breath, heart attacks, or gradual heart failure.
• Brain (Carotid Artery Disease): Restricts blood flow to the brain, risking transient ischemic attacks (TIAs or mini-strokes) and full strokes.
• Limbs (Peripheral Artery Disease): Usually blocks blood flow to the legs, resulting in severe walking pain, numbness, hair loss, and in rare cases, tissue death (gangrene).
• Kidneys (Renal Artery Stenosis): Starves the kidneys of oxygen, which triggers high blood pressure and can evolve into chronic kidney disease.

• Cardioprotective Medications: Doctors commonly prescribe statins to dramatically lower LDL cholesterol or blood pressure medications to reduce vessel strain.
• Lifestyle Overhauls: Adopting a heart-healthy diet low in saturated fats, maintaining consistent exercise, reducing stress, and quitting smoking.
• Surgical Interventions: For severe blockages, specialists perform angioplasty and stenting to physically hold arteries open, or bypass surgery to reroute blood flow around a heavily blocked pathway.

• Full Form & Partnership: Thermal InfraRed Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural Resource Assessment.
• Orbit & Launch: Planned for a 5-year operational lifespan in a sun-synchronous polar orbit (761 km altitude), utilizing ISRO's PSLV.
• Payloads: Equipped with a CNES-developed Thermal Infra-Red (TIR) 4-channel long-wave sensor and an ISRO-built VNIR-SWIR 7-band imaging instrument.
• Resolution & Revisit: Delivers 57-meter resolution for land/coastal zones and 1 km for oceanic/polar regions, with a revisit frequency of three times a week.

• Primary Goals: Focuses on tracking continental water and energy budgets, quantifying terrestrial water stress and evapotranspiration, and monitoring inland/coastal water quality.
• Secondary Focus: Addresses urban microclimates (Urban Heat Islands), volcanic/geothermal anomalies, cryosphere dynamics, and atmospheric data collection.
• Global Frameworks: Data supports international initiatives like GEOGLAM, UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and Global Water Watch.

• Location: Located on a desert plateau on the west bank of the Nile, roughly 20 miles south of Cairo.
• Ancient Capital: It served as the vast, primary necropolis (burial ground) for Memphis, the historic capital of ancient Egypt.
• UNESCO Protection: It is recognized globally as a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site under the "Memphite Necropolis" umbrella.
• Etymology: The name Saqqara is widely believed to be derived from Sokar, the ancient Egyptian god associated with death and the protection of the underworld.

• Evolution of Pyramids: It is the historical site where Egyptian burial architecture transitioned from flat-roofed mud-brick benches (mastabas) into monumental stone pyramids.
• The Step Pyramid of Djoser: Built during the Third Dynasty for Pharaoh Djoser, this 60-meter-tall six-tiered structure is recognized as the world's oldest large-scale stone building complex. It was designed by the legendary architect Imhotep.
• Concentration of Monuments: The site hosts 11 major royal pyramids and at least 28 total pyramid remains spanning over 3,000 years of Pharaonic history.
• Pyramid Texts: The pyramid of King Unas located here features the oldest known pyramid burial chamber decorated with religious texts.

• The Serapeum: A massive underground burial network of galleries that housed the sarcophagi of the Apis Bulls, which were worshipped as living incarnations of the creator god Ptah.
• Private Tombs: Beyond kings, Saqqara is densely layered with thousands of private rock-cut tombs belonging to high officials, priests, and military generals spanning from the Old Kingdom to the Roman Period.
• Christian History: The landscape also contains the Monastery of Saint Jeremiah, a Coptic Christian complex reflecting the site's ongoing religious significance into later eras.

• Place: Near Junnar, Pune district, Maharashtra (about 90–100 km north-east of Pune).
• Type: Hill fort in the Sahyadri (Western Ghats) range.
• Famous as: Traditionally recognised as the birthplace of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (born 1630).
• Status: A historical/heritage site with strong cultural and emotional significance for Maharashtra; often discussed in the context of ASI protection and heritage management.

• Ancient Origins: The fort's roots date back to the Satavahana dynasty (around the 1st century BCE to 2nd century CE). It originally guarded an ancient, lucrative trading route through Naneghat, connecting the Desh region to the port city of Kalyan.
• Shifting Rulers: Over the centuries, control of the fort shifted between the Shilaharas, Yadavas, the Bahmani Sultanate, and the Ahmadnagar Sultanate.
• Bhosale Family Control: In 1595, the Ahmadnagar Sultan, Bahadur Nizam Shah, granted control of Shivneri Fort to Maloji Bhosale (the grandfather of Shivaji Maharaj).
• Birth of a Legend: Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was born inside the fort on February 19, 1630. His mother, Rajmata Jijabai, named him after the local deity, Goddess Shivai, after praying to her for a son. Shivaji Maharaj spent his early childhood years growing up within these protective walls.
• Impenetrable Reputation: In 1673, an English traveller named Fraze documented that the fort was exceptionally strong and practically undefeated due to its defensive architecture.

• Defensive Design: It is a triangular-shaped hill fort heavily guarded by strong mud walls all around it.
• The Seven Gates: Accessing the fort requires passing through seven winding, highly fortified gates designed to delay and ambush enemies: Maha Darwaza, Parvangicha Darwaza, Hatti Darwaza, Peer Darwaza, Shipai Darwaza, Phatak Darwaza, and Kulambkat Darwaza.
• Water Management: The fort features a self-sustaining water system. At its center lies the Badami Talav (a massive pond). It also contains two perennial fresh-water springs named Ganga and Yamuna that flow year-round.
• Religious & Cultural Elements: Inside the fort complex, visitors can find the Shivai Devi Temple, a prayer hall, a tomb, a mosque (Kamani Masjid), and an execution point known as Kadelot Kada.
• Statues: A central attraction is a touching monument featuring statues of Rajmata Jijabai and a young Shivaji Maharaj.
• Nearby Attractions: Located just 2 kilometers away are the ancient Lenyadri caves, a series of Buddhist rock-cut caves that also houses one of the prominent Ashtavinayak Ganesha temples.

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