Current Affairs: 16th & 17th October 2025

• Trade deficit widens 93% in Sept. as services slump

Context:  month. However, the data shows that for the first half of the financial year — April to September 2025, the trade deficit shrank by 2.3%.

• Data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry on Wednesday showed that India’s total exports stood at $67.2 billion in September 2025, up 0.8% over September 2024.
• Total imports, on the other hand, grew 11.3% to $83.8 billion over the same period.
• As a result, the trade deficit in September nearly doubled to $16.6 billion, compared to $8.6 billion in September 2024.

Goods exports grow

• Notably, the relatively poor performance of the export sector was due to lower exports of services and not goods. India’s goods exports grew 6.7% to $36.4 billion in September 2025 despite that being the first full month of 50% tariffs imposed by the U.S. on imports from India.
• Services, which have so far bolstered India’s export performance, saw exports shrinking 5.5% in September 2025 to $30.8 billion.
• However, while the data shows that India’s exports to the U.S. are indeed 13.4% higher in the cumulative April-September 2025 period than in the same period last year, they have been declining steadily over the last few months. That is, where India’s exports to the U.S. stood at $8.8 billion in May 2025, they were valued at $5.5 billion in September 2025.
• “It is heartening to know that in this turbulence, our merchandise exports have kept up,” Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal said in a press briefing. “That means our industry has been resilient and they have been able to withstand the turbulence by retaining their supply chains and business. They might be taking on some of the costs on themselves,” Mr. Agrawal added.
• He also sought to downplay the increase in the trade deficit in September, saying that international trade does not always follow the same pattern from year to year.
• “On a cumulative basis, we are still doing better than last year,” Mr. Agrawal said. “That means the part of the exports that are not facing tariffs are growing well, but also the part of the exports that do face the tariffs are also growing. The exports have not come down.”
• Looking at the first half of the financial year, the data shows that total exports grew 4.45% in the April-September 2025 period to $413.3 billion. Total imports grew at a relatively slower 3.55% to $472.8 billion over the same period. As a result, the trade deficit during the first half of the financial year shrank by 2.3%.

• Night light data from 2013 and 2023 reveals limited urban growth in Bihar

Context: A comparison of night light data from 2013 and 2023 shows that most Assembly constituencies in Bihar continue to remain predominantly rural. Only a few constituencies have shown significant growth in nighttime luminosity, primarily in Patna, which was already among the more urbanised parts of the State.

• Nighttime illumination can serve as a useful proxy for gauging human activity and electricity usage in an area. A higher concentration of night lights often reflects not just street or vehicular lighting, but also ongoing economic activities such as construction or roadwork. Together, these patterns of brightness offer a visual measure of urban growth and development.
• This method is used to classify constituencies in a State as rural, semi-rural, semi-urban, or urban. This approach is adopted due to the absence of up-to-date official data on the subject, and as administrative boundaries vary from political boundaries.

• Delhi HC seeks responseon vacancies in National Commission for Minorities

Context: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought a response from the Union government on long-pending vacancies in the National Commission for Minorities (NCM).

• A Division Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela, while hearing a PIL plea filed by Mujahid Nafees, who claimed to be the convener of the Minority Coordination Committee working on the welfare of minorities across India, pointed out that the commission cannot remain headless for so long.
• Granting time to the Central government’s counsel to obtain instructions in the matter, the court said the petition was raising a very important issue.
• “Do not wait for the next date of hearing. Please ensure that things start moving,” the court said. The petition stated that the posts of chairperson, vice-chairperson and members of the NCM have been vacant since April, the month Iqbal Singh Lalpura completed his term as chairman.

• The National Commission for Minorities which works under the Ministry of Minority Affairs and has quasi-judicial powers, should have seven members, including the Chairperson, and the Vice-Chairperson.
• The National Commission of Minorities Act, 1992 mandates the appointment of one member from each of the six minority communities — Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi, and Jain.

• “There is a complete and systematic incapacitation of the National Commission for Minorities due to the Centre’s failure to appoint its head and members ,” the plea states.

• The petition added that the government’s inaction is further aggravated by the fact that it is in direct contravention of the spirit and letter of a prior order from the High Court where it had expressed its dissatisfaction with such delays.

• China files WTO complaint on India’s EV, battery subsidies

Context: China has filed a complaint against India in the World Trade Organization (WTO) over New Delhi’s subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries.

• Commerce Secretary said that the Ministry will look into the detailed submissions made by China.

Similar applications

• Confirming the move, an official said that China had also filed similar applications against Turkiye, Canada and the EU.n“They have sought consultations with India,” the official said.
• Seeking consultation is the first step of the dispute settlement process as per WTO rules.
• If the consultations requested with India do not result in a satisfactory solution, the EU can request the WTO set up a panel in the case to rule on the issue raised.

• China is the second-largest trading partner of India. In the last fiscal, India’s exports to China contracted 14.5% to $14.25 billion against $16.66 billion in 2023-24.
• The imports, however, rose by 11.52% in 2024-25 to $113.45 billion against $101.73 billion in 2023-24.
• India’s trade deficit with China had widened to $99.2 billion during the year 2024-25.

• Russia backs AMCA, offers to make Su-57 jets in India

Context: Russia reaffirmed its commitment to deepen defence cooperation with India with its Ambassador Denis Alipov expressing his country’s readiness to support India’s Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme through “local production” of the Su-57 fifth-generation fighter jet.

• The move underscores the long-standing strategic partnership between the two nations, which has evolved far beyond a traditional buyer-seller relationship into one of joint development, co-production, and full technology sharing. He also said that both sides are exploring collaborations in next-generation technologies.
• The announcement comes amid growing speculation about the future of the India-Russia oil trade, following U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that India would soon halt such purchases.
• However, the Ambassador said that “Russian energy remains the most cost-effective option on the global market”.
• On the defence ties with India, he said: “For over six decades, Russia has been a trusted defence partner and a key contributor to India’s military modernisation, with nearly 70% of India’s defence equipment of Russian origin, and a testament to its effectiveness has (been) demonstrated by Operation Sindoor. The partnership has produced several landmark achievements, most notably the joint production of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, which is now being upgraded to a hypersonic version.”
• Mr. Alipov said that both sides are exploring collaborations in next-generation technologies, including anti-drone systems, advanced radar solutions, and precision strike capabilities.

• Trump and MEA at odds over Russian oil imports

Context: Trump claims Modi gave commitment to stop buying oil from Russia ‘soon’; Ministry denies the leaders discussed the issue, but says govt. is ‘broad-basing’ and ‘diversifying’ its energy sources.  

• India and the United States continued to differ publicly over Russian oil as U.S. President Donald Trump said he had been assured by Prime Minister Narendra Modi that India will stop buying oil from Russia, while the Ministry of External Affairs maintained the two leaders had not spoken about the issue.
• However, the MEA said that India was “broad-basing” and “diversifying” its sources of energy according to market needs, and did not specifically deny the claim that it was reducing its intake.

Bone of contention

• The subject of Russian oil, which has led to the U.S. imposing penalty tariffs on India, is also believed to be holding up trade talks between the two countries. While the government has consistently denied it would bow to pressure, data analysed by The Hindu showed that oil public sector undertakings have dropped their Russian imports by as much as 45% between June and September this year, even though Russia remains India’s biggest supplier overall.
• “I am not aware of any conversation yesterday between the two leaders,” MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told reporters here on Thursday, also clarifying that a call between Mr. Modi and Mr. Trump last Thursday had only dealt with the Gaza peace plan and India-U.S. trade issues.
• Mr. Trump had said he was confident that India would end its oil imports “soon” but not “immediately”.

• Farmers of rain-fed areas to get input subsidy of ₹17,000 per ha

Context: As farmers incurred crop loss on 12.82 lakh hectares on account of excess rainfall during the south-west monsoon in the State, the Karnataka Cabinet has fixed the input subsidy to farmers of rain-fed area crops at ₹17,000 per hectare, ₹25,500 per hectare for crops in irrigated land, and ₹31,000 per hectare for perennial crops.

• The input subsidy would be given for a maximum of up to two hectares. The input subsidy fixed by the government was higher than the amount fixed under NDRF norms.
• A sum of ₹1,090 crore would be additional burden to the government, Minister for Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister after a Cabinet meeting.
• He said the Cabinet cancelled the necessity of securing occupancy certificates (OC) by owners of residential houses constructed on 1,200 sqft in municipalities. However, the owners must construct houses as per the plan approved by the authorities.

Cricket stadium

• It has cleared a ₹2,350 crore for construction of a cricket stadium at Suryanagara of Anekal taluk of Bengaluru Rural district. However, the final clearance would be given after obtaining detailed project report, he said. The stadium would be developed on 75 acres.
• A sum of ₹54.92 crore was approved for purchase of necessary equipment for commencement of a super-speciality 100-bed hospital in Vijayapura. It also approved ₹100 crore each for developing NIMHANS-like hospitals in Kalaburagi and Mysuru medical colleges.
• The Cabinet approved ₹650 crore for treating sewage in Vrishabhavati River Valley and treated water would be used for filling tanks in Bengaluru Urban and Rural and Chickballapur districts.
• The Cabinet decided to cancel the necessity of passing the Kannada language test by probationary officers after the recruitment. Since candidates have to pass a 150-mark Kannada language test during the recruitment, it was decided to scrap the test after the recruitment.

• FSSAI says only WHO-approved products can be labelled as ORS

Context: A Hyderabad-based paediatrician’s long-standing fight against sugar-rich beverages falsely marketed as oral rehydration solutions (ORS) has resulted in a major regulatory change. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has issued an order stating that no food brand may use the term ‘Oral Rehydration Salts’ or ‘ORS’ on its products unless the formulation adheres strictly to the standards recommended by the World Health Organisation.

• The directive, issued mandates the immediate withdrawal of all previous permissions granted to food business operators for using ‘ORS’ in conjunction with their brand names.
• Specifically, it rescinds two earlier orders, dated July 14, 2022, and February 2, 2024, that had allowed the use of ‘ORS’ as part of a trademark with a prefix or suffix, provided the label included a disclaimer stating, “The product is not an ORS formula as recommended by WHO.”

• FSSAI issued a detailed clarification reaffirming that the use of ‘ORS’ in any food product’s name, whether fruit-based, non-carbonated, or ready-to-drink, violates the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, and related regulations. The regulator stated that such labelling ‘misleads consumers by way of false, deceptive, ambiguous, and erroneous names or label declarations,’ and therefore contravenes multiple provisions under the Act.

• This regulatory intervention stems from a persistent legal campaign by paediatrician Sivaranjani Santosh, who began questioning deceptive marketing practices nearly a decade ago.

• ‘Studying space weather mustbe a major activity for humans’

Context: The PUNCH Space Mission, launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) earlier this year to observe the ‘young solar wind,’ is “making the invisible, visible,” Craig Edward DeForest, Principal Investigator of the mission, has said.

• “We are making the solar wind visible,” Dr. DeForest said on Wednesday evening, while giving a public lecture on ‘Imaging Almost Nothing At All…With the PUNCH Space Mission of NASA’ in Thiruvananthapuram. The lecture was jointly organised by the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), the Christ University Nodal Office and the local chapter of the Breakthrough Science Society.

• PUNCH, short for ‘Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere,’ is attempting to understand the corona (the Sun’s outermost atmosphere) and the solar wind as “a single system,” according to Dr. DeForest, who is also Director of the Department of Solar and Heliospheric Physics, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

• Studying and forecasting space weather should be important activities for humans, Dr. DeForest said. He points out that they provide a way to “protect ourselves.” Solar events such as the solar wind and coronal mass ejections can have impacts across the solar system.

Solar maximum

• The sun is now in a time of solar maximum, a period of high activity. In five years or so it will be much quieter, he said. “We cannot predict when an ejection will happen, but we can predict that ejections will happen over an interval of time,” he said.

• Google’s new AI finds promising approach for cancer treatment

Context: Opening a portal to a new approach to drug discovery, Google unveiled a family of artificial intelligence tools that proposed a drug combination for detecting cancer that human experts did not know about, which seemed effective in laboratory conditions.

• This is a rare instance of AI being used in the process of scientific discovery to design practical drug candidates.
• The Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B (C2S-Scale) is a 27-billion-parameter foundation model designed to understand the language of individual cells. “This announcement marks a milestone for AI in science,” Shekoofeh Azizi and Brian Perozzi, staff scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research, respectively, said in a blogpost, adding, “C2S-Scale generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behaviour and we have since confirmed its prediction with experimental validation in living cells. This discovery reveals a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer.”
• Their research paper, with the scientific details, was made available for public scrutiny at bioRxiv, a repository of pre-prints.
• The problem that researchers set out to solve was how to detect an emerging tumour when the immune system itself was unaware of it. A strategy was to force such nascent tumours to display immune-triggering signals through a process called antigen presentation.
• The C2S-Scale 27B model was given a task: find a drug that boosts immune signals only if low levels of interferon are present. Interferons are proteins produced by the body and act as frontline defenders against infections and tumours.
• This is a situation that exists when a tumour is likely secretly growing while avoiding the body’s natural threat detection system. Small AI, or Large Language Models were unable to learn this. By exposing the 27-billion parameter model to two large data sets — real-world patient samples with tumour-immune interactions plus low-level interferon signalling and cell-line data with no immune context — the scientists trod upon insight.
• They first simulated the effect of over 4,000 drugs and noted how many of them worked in situations where interferon levels were low even as the tumours grew. Out of the many drug candidates highlighted by the model, a fraction (10%-30%) of drug hits are already known in prior literature, while the remaining drugs were “surprising hits with no prior known link”. The model zeroed in on a chemical drug called silmitasertib that only seemed to boost the immune system when it suspected a tumour.
• “With more pre-clinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer,” Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet, posted on X on Thursday.

• Indian iron and steel exporters face the highest CBAM levy

Context: Indian exporters of iron and steel to EU may have to pay about €301 million (approximately ₹3,000 crore) in Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) fees, the highest among all countries exporting similar products to the EU, an analysis by European non-profit think-tank Sandberg has found.

• CBAM is a levy that European importers must pay if they buy products from countries whose production emits more carbon dioxide per tonne than equivalent goods manufactured within the EU.
• An online calculator developed by Sandberg, made public, estimates that Russia will face the next highest CBAM charges (€240 million), followed by Ukraine (€198 million) and China (€194 million).
• The analysis further indicates that India’s total CBAM liability, covering exports of aluminium and cement in addition to iron and steel, stands at about €330 million, or roughly 1.05% of the value of all traded goods. However, the study also suggests that Indian exporters could earn higher revenues, estimated at €510 million, if they shift to cleaner technologies, resulting in a net cost reduction of around €180 million.
• India has consistently opposed the CBAM, with industry bodies describing it as a “non-tariff barrier”.
• Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said in July that if the EU implemented the CBAM, India would “retaliate with taxes of its own.”

• India in active talks for trade pact with U.S., EU, Oman: Goyal

Context: India has implemented a number of free trade agreements with developed nations and is in active dialogue for such pacts with nations including the U.S., Oman, and the EU, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said.

• India has implemented trade pacts with Australia, the UAE and EFTA bloc. It has also signed an agreement with the U.K.
• “We have done free trade agreements (FTAs) with many developed countries in the last three years… We are in active dialogue with the U.S., EU, Chile, Peru, New Zealand, and Oman,” the Minister told reporters here.
• “It clearly shows that India is the favoured and preferred destination both for investment and for bilateral trade,” he added.

Pact with Brazil

• Mr. Goyal also said with Brazil also, he has discussed expanding preferential trade agreement from its current level so that “we can” in the future penetrate the South American market in a bigger way.
• The Indian official team is in Washington now to hold trade talks with U.S. counterparts. The team will be there till October 17. In February, leaders of India and the U.S. asked officials to negotiate a Bilateral Trade Agreement. They fixed a deadline to conclude the first tranche of the pact by the fall (October-November) of 2025.