Current Affairs — 2 July 2026

1. Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025

Core Context

For nearly twenty years, India's rural employment guarantee framework rested on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005, a law that gave every rural household a legal right to one hundred days of unskilled wage work. On 1st July 2026, this framework was replaced nationwide by a new law, the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, commonly referred to as VB-G RAM G. The shift reflects a broader policy philosophy: moving away from pure poverty-relief employment toward employment that is tied to durable rural infrastructure and climate resilience, in keeping with the government's Viksit Bharat @2047 vision.

Latest Developments

The new Act expands the guaranteed employment period from one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five days per household per year. However, it also introduces an aggregated sixty-day "blackout" period during peak sowing and harvesting seasons, meant to protect the supply of agricultural labour during critical farming windows. For the first time, a nationwide wage floor of two hundred rupees has been fixed, meaning no state can pay below this amount under the scheme, though several northern and northeastern states have had to raise wages sharply to meet this floor while southern states saw only marginal increases.

A major structural change lies in funding. Where the old law was funded almost entirely by the Centre, the new Act adopts a sixty-forty Centre-State funding split for most states, with more generous ratios for northeastern and Himalayan states and full central funding for Union Territories without legislatures. Instead of open-ended, demand-based funding, the Centre will now set expenditure ceilings for each state based on the recommendations of the Sixteenth Finance Commission, a model critics call a shift from a rights-based guarantee to a budget-capped scheme. Workers will now be issued new Gramin Rozgar Guarantee Cards, and all assets created under the scheme will be mapped digitally under a unified national infrastructure stack, with local planning meant to align with the PM Gati Shakti master plan.

Prelims-Relevant Basic Information

• The statutory right to work in India was first introduced by the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Act of 1977, which later inspired the national rural employment guarantee law of 2005.

• Panchayati Raj Institutions, especially Gram Panchayats, have constitutional backing through the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act, which gave them a central role in rural planning and implementation.

• The Finance Commission is a constitutional body under Article 280, mainly responsible for recommending the distribution of tax revenues between the Centre and states; the Sixteenth Finance Commission's recommendations are now being used as a basis for allocating rural employment funds.

• Aspirants should remember that India's rural employment programmes evolved over decades, starting with the Rural Manpower Programme of the 1960s, moving through the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana of 1993 and the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana of 1999, before culminating in the 2005 national guarantee law.

2. Strengthening Food Safety in India

Core Context

A series of large-scale food poisoning incidents across India has once again drawn attention to weaknesses in the country's food safety governance. Food safety in India is regulated primarily through the Food Safety and Standards Act of 2006, which created a single regulatory authority to oversee licensing, inspection, and quality standards for food businesses. Despite this legal architecture, implementation on the ground remains patchy, and recent poisoning incidents have exposed just how wide the gap is between law and practice.

Latest Developments

According to official crime records, over eleven hundred people died due to food poisoning in India in a recent year, while global health estimates suggest unsafe food causes hundreds of millions of illnesses and over a million deaths worldwide each year, with young children bearing a disproportionate share of this burden. India's own State Food Safety Index, which evaluates states on inspection, testing, training, and consumer awareness, shows that a majority of states scored below fifty out of a hundred in the latest assessment cycle, reflecting weak enforcement systems. Staffing shortages compound the problem: nearly forty percent of positions in the central food safety authority remain vacant, and states report similarly large gaps in the number of Food Safety Officers actually available in the field compared to what is sanctioned.

Beyond staffing, the news also highlighted emerging chemical hazards such as heavy metal contamination in staple foods, the unchecked use of antibiotics in livestock contributing to antimicrobial resistance, and the growing menace of food adulteration in sectors like dairy and edible oil. A new concern flagged is "health-washing", where food businesses use misleading labels and unverified health claims to market processed foods as nutritious. In response, regulators have proposed a risk-based inspection framework and clearer front-of-pack warning labels using colour codes to flag unhealthy food content.

Prelims-Relevant Basic Information

• The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India functions under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and was established under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, which repealed the earlier Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954.

• Key flagship initiatives of the food safety regulator include Eat Right India, the Repurpose Used Cooking Oil initiative, and the Food Safety Mitra Scheme, all aimed at improving compliance and food quality at the grassroots level.

• Antimicrobial Resistance refers to the ability of microorganisms to survive exposure to drugs that would normally kill them or stop their growth, and it is considered one of the top global public health threats by the World Health Organization.

• Aspirants should note that food safety overlaps conceptually with food security, but the two are distinct: food security relates to availability and access to food, while food safety concerns the quality and harmlessness of the food consumed.

3. Ease of Living: Key Government Initiatives and Outcomes (2014–2026)

Core Context

The government presented a comprehensive twelve-year review of its citizen-centric governance reforms, highlighting cumulative progress across housing, clean energy, drinking water, sanitation, financial inclusion, and transport infrastructure. This kind of consolidated review is useful for aspirants because it packages together dozens of individual schemes under a single comparative lens, making it easier to remember scheme names alongside their outcomes.

Latest Developments

On housing, the urban housing scheme has sanctioned over one crore twenty-five lakh houses since its launch, while its rural counterpart has sanctioned nearly four crore houses, with about seventy-five percent registered in the name of women or in joint ownership. On clean cooking fuel, national LPG coverage rose from just over half of households in 2014 to more than full saturation counting multiple connections by 2026. The Jal Jeevan Mission, launched in 2019 to achieve tap water in every rural household, expanded coverage from about three crore rural households to nearly sixteen crore households by mid-2026, and has now been extended as Jal Jeevan Mission 2.0 till the end of 2028.

On sanitation, rural coverage moved from thirty-nine percent in 2014 to full coverage by 2019, with continuing work on solid and liquid waste management under an extended "open defecation free plus" framework. On energy, India's total installed power capacity more than doubled over the twelve-year period, and renewable energy capacity nearly quadrupled, pushing India to the third-largest clean energy capacity in the world. Average rural electricity supply rose sharply, narrowing the historic gap between rural and urban power availability. On financial inclusion, the flagship bank account scheme launched in 2014 has grown to cover over fifty-eight crore accounts, serving as the backbone for direct benefit transfers that channel welfare payments straight to beneficiaries, reducing leakages.

Prelims-Relevant Basic Information

• The Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile trinity refers to the three-pillar approach combining bank accounts, biometric identification, and mobile connectivity to enable direct and leak-proof delivery of government benefits.

• The Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, launched in 2015, focuses on basic urban infrastructure such as water supply, sewerage, and green spaces in statutory towns.

• The UDAN scheme, whose full form is Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik, aims to make air travel affordable and connect underserved regions through subsidised regional air routes.

• Aspirants should keep in mind the distinction between PM Awas Yojana Urban and Gramin variants, since both aim at "Housing for All" but are designed for different target populations and have different funding patterns.

4. UN Sustainable Development Report 2026

Core Context

The United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual Sustainable Development Report for 2026, ranking one hundred and sixty-seven countries on their progress toward the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015. This report is a useful annual benchmark for tracking how India is performing on a globally comparable scale across poverty, health, education, gender equality, climate, and governance indicators.

Latest Developments

India recorded its highest-ever position in the index, moving up to ninety-fourth position out of one hundred and sixty-seven countries, with an overall score of just above sixty-eight out of a hundred. This marks an eighteen-place climb since the goals were first adopted in 2015, making India one of the fastest-improving major economies alongside China, though it still trails smaller South Asian neighbours on the same index. Globally, the report cautions that not a single one of the seventeen goals is on track to be met by the 2030 deadline, with only a small fraction of individual targets progressing as planned and a worrying share actively regressing since 2015. Nordic countries continue to occupy the top ranks, while conflict-affected nations occupy the bottom.

For India specifically, hunger-related indicators remain the most concerning area, with child wasting and stunting figures continuing to cause alarm, placing India among the worst performers globally on this particular measure. The report also flags a sharp decline in India's press freedom score and a worsening of health indicators linked to air pollution and lifestyle diseases. On the positive side, India has shown strong global progress in expanding electricity access and mobile internet penetration, two areas where its trajectory has been particularly steep over the past decade.

Prelims-Relevant Basic Information

• The Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by all one hundred and ninety-three United Nations member states in 2015 under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, comprising seventeen goals and one hundred and sixty-nine targets.

• In India, NITI Aayog serves as the nodal agency for tracking SDG implementation through its own SDG India Index, which ranks states and Union Territories to encourage cooperative and competitive federalism.

• The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation tracks India's SDG progress domestically through a National Indicator Framework built around a large set of national indicators.

• Aspirants should note the conceptual lineage of the SDGs, which trace back to the Brundtland Commission of 1987, followed by the Millennium Development Goals of 2000, before evolving into the current SDG framework after the Rio+20 Summit of 2012.

5. Ten Years of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana

Core Context

The Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana, India's flagship irrigation scheme, has completed a decade since its launch in 2015. The scheme was created to expand irrigated farmland, improve the efficiency with which water is used on farms, and encourage sustainable conservation of water resources, an especially important goal given the pressure on groundwater in many agricultural states.

Latest Developments

The scheme operates as a centrally sponsored core scheme, with funding shared between the Centre and states in the standard sixty-forty ratio for most states, a more generous ninety-ten ratio for northeastern and Himalayan states, and full central funding for Union Territories. It was formed by combining several older programmes covering irrigation infrastructure, river development, watershed management, and on-farm water management into a single unified mission built around two guiding ideas: storing rainwater efficiently, described locally as Jal Sanchay, and using water efficiently at the field level, described as Jal Sinchan.

The scheme's various components have delivered measurable outcomes: its irrigation infrastructure component has benefited over seventeen million farmers since 2016 alone, while its watershed development component has supported over one million farmers through soil and water conservation works. A newer sub-scheme approved in 2025-26 focuses on modernising command area development to improve last-mile water delivery through pressurised piped and micro-irrigation systems. The scheme's current phase runs through 2026 with a total outlay exceeding ninety-three thousand crore rupees, and the latest Union Budget allocated close to six thousand six hundred crore rupees to it for the coming year.

Prelims-Relevant Basic Information

• Micro-irrigation refers to water-efficient irrigation techniques such as drip and sprinkler irrigation that deliver water directly to the root zone of plants, minimising wastage compared to traditional flood irrigation.

• The scheme's Per Drop More Crop component, which earlier promoted micro-irrigation technologies, has since been merged into the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana from 2022-23 onward.

• The Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme, one of the scheme's key components, focuses specifically on completing long-pending major and medium irrigation projects.

• Aspirants should remember that irrigation and water resource management fall under the Concurrent List in some aspects but are largely a State subject under the Constitution, which is why Centre-State funding ratios matter so much in scheme design.