Current Affairs

‘Bacteria can talk to each other and are multilingual’

Context: Bacteria can get into us, make us sick, and they can even kill us – but they give us our life too. Bonnie Bassler, renowned molecular biologist and professor of Princeton University, best known for her work in bacterial communication, described bacteria as “magical microbes” holding great promise in the fields of medicine, ​environment and agriculture.

• “Bacteria can talk to each other and are multilingual, have so much to teach us about how collective behaviours evolved on earth,” said Prof. Bassler said at a lecture on Wednesday titled ‘A chemical language that enables communication between diverse organisms’. “It’s the bacteria in your gut that digests food and gives you those [nutrients].”
• This phenomenon of bacterial communication, or “quorum sensing” could indeed be a game changer for medicine, by opening new avenues to develop anti-quorum sensing therapies instead of antibiotics. Several are “notorious bacterial characters,” she said, specifically citing the deadly cholera-causing Vibrio cholerae bacterium, and perspectives on treating the disease.
• This bacterium is “the terrible cousin” to an obscure but brilliantly bioluminescent bacterium, the Vibrio fischeri that makes blue light and lives in a wonderful one-to-one symbiosis with a squid, she explained.
• The large squids live in knee-deep water along the coast of Hawaii. And as it is a nocturnal animal, when scavenging under a bright moonlit sky, it needs a way to protect itself from predators that track the squid through their moving shadow. And this is where Vibrio fischeri glows under the squid, making it shadowless. We know that bacteria very early in life colonise us and they teach our immune system over time to keep harmful bacteria out and to let good bacteria in, she said, adding “We don’t know how they do it, but we know that the microbes are in charge of educating our immune system.”
• “But there are no ​applications unless people, scientists make discoveries and work on mechanisms and work at the very basic part of how life on Earth manages to do what it does,” Prof. Bassler said.
• Prof. Bassler said she was delighted that she was delivering her lecture on the International Day for Women and Girls in Science.

Tamil Brahmi inscriptions discovered in Egypt

• Tamil Brahmi inscriptions discovered in Egypt shed light on ancient trade links

Context: A path-breaking finding has shed new light on trade links between ancient Tamilagam, other parts of India, and the Roman Empire. Two researchers have identified close to 30 inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi, Prakrit and Sanskrit at tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. These inscriptions are said to belong to the period between the 1st and 3rd Centuries CE

• The inscriptions were identified during a study in 2024 and 2025 by Charlotte Schmid, Professor at the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) in Paris, and Ingo Strauch, Professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The team documented them across six tombs in the Theban Necropolis. They followed in the footsteps of French scholar Jules Baillet, who surveyed the Valley of the Kings in 1926 and published more than 2,000 Greek graffiti marks.
• Presenting their findings in a paper titled “From the Valley of the Kings to India: Indian Inscriptions in Egypt” at the ongoing International Conference on Tamil Epigraphy, the scholars said the individuals who made these inscriptions came from the north-western, western and southern regions of the Indian subcontinent, with those from the latter forming the majority.
• Visitors had left brief inscriptions and graffiti by carving their names on the walls of corridors and rooms, marking their presence in the tombs, the researchers said, adding that these sets of inscriptions appear inside the tombs alongside larger bodies of graffiti in other languages, primarily Greek.
• Within such settings, the Indian visitors seem to have followed an existing practice of leaving their names inside the tombs, they said.
• The name Cikai Korran (pronounced ‘Kotran’) appears repeatedly. It was inscribed eight times across five tombs. The name was found near entrances and high on interior walls among other graffiti marks. In one tomb, it appears at a height of about four metres at the entrance, Mr. Strauch said. “The name Cikai Korran is revealing, as its first element may be connected to the Sanskrit śikhā, meaning tuft or crown. While this is not a common personal name, the second element, korran, is more distinctly Tamil. It carries strong warlike associations, as it derives from a root, korram, meaning victory and slaying. This root is echoed in the Chera warrior goddess Korravai and the term korravan, meaning king,” Ms. Schmid said.
• The name korran also came up in other finds in Egypt. It appears in Korrapumān, written on a sherd discovered at Berenike, a Red Sea port city, in 1995. The name also occurs in the Sangam corpus, where the Chera king Pittānkorran, praised in the Purananooru, is sometimes directly addressed as korran, the scholars pointed out, adding that these parallel attestations in inscriptions from Pugalur, the ancient Chera capital, dated back to the 2nd or 3rd century C.E.
• Two other individuals also left their names in Tamil Brahmi in these tombs. One inscription reads Kopān varata kantan (Kopān came and saw). The name Kopān has also been found at Ammankovilpatti in Tamil Nadu. Other Tamil names identified include Cātan and Kiran. “When I first identified these inscriptions, I could not believe it. Because so many people have visited these tombs over the years and nobody has identified anything Indian. I asked Charlotte whether I was mistaken,” Mr. Strauch said.
• K. Rajan, academic and research adviser, Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology, said the findings are significant as they shed light on the trade links between ancient Tamilagam from the Malabar Coast and the Roman Empire. He said that earlier work in Egypt had focused on the Red Sea port city of Berenike, where excavations were conducted for several years and attention has now moved to the Nile river valley.

Right to Information (RTI)

Human rights body could function as RTI panel, moots SC

Context: The Supreme Court mooted whether the Chairpersons of Human Rights Commissions of States with low traffic of Right to Information (RTI) appeals could be given additional responsibility of acting as Chief Information Commissioners (CICs) till there is an increase in workload.

• “Suppose it is just 100 appeals pending in a State Information Commission… Any institution you create is a burden on the public exchequer. Taxpayers’ money must be spent on development activities or something… Why not in such States, as an ad-hoc mechanism, the power of the Information Commissions be given to the State Human Rights Commissions?” Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, heading a three-judge Bench, asked advocates Prashant Bhushan and Rahul Gupta for the petitioners.
• The court was hearing a petition filed by petitioners Anjali Bhardwaj, Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired) and Amrita Johri, seeking timely and transparent appointments to the Information Commissions under the RTI Act.
• The Chief Justice said the “ad-hoc mechanism” could continue till the number of RTI appeals increases in “due course of time”.

Article 309 of the Constitution

MNS officers to be eligible for re-employment benefits

Context: The Union Government has notified the Ex-servicemen (Re-employment in Central Civil Services & Posts) Amendment Rules, 2026 under Article 309 of the Constitution, formally expanding the definition of ex-servicemen to include personnel of the Military Nursing Service (MNS).

• The amendment revises Rule 2(c)(i) to explicitly cover those who have served in any rank — combatant or non-combatant — in the Regular Army, Navy or Air Force, as well as the Military Nursing Service of the Indian Union. The change removes a long-standing ambiguity over the eligibility of MNS officers, who are commissioned officers, for re-employment benefits available to other veterans.
• MNS personnel are now entitled to the same re-employment provisions as other ex-servicemen.

Article 309 of the Constitution of India

👉 Provision relating to Recruitment and Conditions of Service of persons serving the Union or a State

Meaning and Scope

Article 309 provides that:

• Parliament (for Union services) and State Legislatures (for State services) have the power to make laws regulating the recruitment and conditions of service of persons appointed to public services and posts.
• Until such laws are enacted,
  • The President (for Union services) and
  • The Governor (for State services)
    may make rules regulating these matters.

Key Features

• Covers service conditions such as recruitment, pay, promotion, transfer, disciplinary action, and retirement of government employees.
• Rules made by the President or Governor under Article 309 have statutory force.
• If Parliament or a State Legislature later enacts a law, that law will prevail over the rules.

In Brief

Article 309 forms the constitutional basis of civil services administration in India, ensuring a legal framework for governing the service conditions of government employees.

Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026

Context: Amended IT Rules call for disclosure of AI-generated synthetic media, and warn platforms of loss of safe harbour for non-compliance; changes notified by the govt. to take effect on February 20.

• The Union government has notified amendments to the Information Technology Act, 2021, requiring photorealistic AI-generated content to be prominently labelled. The changes, which will come into force on February 20, also significantly shorten timelines for takedown of illegal material.
• Under the new rules, social media platforms will now have between two and three hours to remove certain categories of unlawful content, a sharp reduction from the earlier 24-36 hours.
• Content deemed illegal by a court or an “appropriate government” will have to be taken down within three hours, while sensitive content, featuring non-consensual nudity and deepfakes, must be removed within two hours.

• The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026, defines synthetically generated content as “audio, visual or audio-visual information which is artificially or algorithmically created, generated, modified or altered using a computer resource, in a manner that such information appears to be real, authentic or true and depicts or portrays any individual or event in a manner that is, or is likely to be perceived as indistinguishable from a natural person or a real-world event.” The final definition is narrower than the one released in a draft version of these rules in October 2025. As with the existing IT Rules, failure to comply with the rules could result in loss of safe harbour, the legal principle that sites allowing users to post content cannot automatically be held liable in the same way as a publisher of a book or a periodical can.

• The rules include a carve-out for touch-ups that smartphone cameras often perform automatically.
• Platforms will be required to seek disclosures from users in case their content is AI-generated. If such a disclosure is not received for synthetically generated content, the official said, firms would either have to proactively label the content or take it down in cases of non-consensual deepfakes.
• The amended rules mandate that AI-generated imagery be labelled “prominently”. While the draft version specified that 10% of any imagery would have to be covered with such a disclosure, platforms have been given some more leeway, the official said, since they pushed back on such a specific mandate.

Safe harbour

• “Provided that where [a social media] intermediary becomes aware, or it is otherwise established, that the intermediary knowingly permitted, promoted, or failed to act upon such synthetically generated information in contravention of these rules, such intermediary shall be deemed to have failed to exercise due diligence under this sub-rule,” the rules say, hinting at a loss of safe harbour.
• The rules also partially roll back an amendment notified in October 2025, which had limited each State to designating a single officer authorised to issue takedown orders. States may now notify more than one such officer— an “administrative” measure to address the need of States with large populations, the official said.

New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START)

Context: The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) officially expired on February 5, marking the end of the last remaining bilateral agreement constraining the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia. The New START treaty emerged from a period of diplomatic reset between Washington and Moscow in the late 2000s.

• After entering into force on February 5, 2011, New START set up verifiable limits on the strategic offensive arms of both nations, including capping the number of deployed warheads to 1,550, and required both parties to reach these limits within seven years and maintain them thereafter. It also allowed 18 on-site inspections a year, mandated data exchange, and set up a bilateral commission to resolve issues.
• New START was constantly beleaguered. Russia often argued that U.S. missile defense systems undermined the strategic balance, suggesting that if one side could neutralise the other’s retaliatory strike, the ‘mutually assured destruction’ dynamic would be broken. The U.S. expressed concerns over conventional prompt global strike capabilities, where precise conventional warheads are placed on ballistic missiles, systems that New START counted under its nuclear limits.
• Later Russia also unveiled several novel strategic systems, including the Sarmat heavy ICBM and the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle. While the U.S. successfully argued that these should be counted under New START, other systems like the nuclear-powered underwater drone Poseidon and nuclear-powered cruise missile Burevestnik remained outside the treaty’s technical definitions.

No binding limits

• The treaty was originally set to expire in 2021. Just days before the deadline, the Biden administration and the Kremlin agreed to a one-time, five-year extension, moving the expiration date to February 5, 2026. But in February 2023, after the conflict in Ukraine escalated and undermined bilateral relations, President Vladimir Putin said he was suspending Russia’s participation in New START because, Moscow said, the U.S. was seeking a “strategic defeat” of Russia and that western aid to Ukraine made on-site inspections in Russia impossible. The U.S. soon followed.
• Today, for the first time since 1972, there are no legally binding limits on the number of strategic nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia can deploy. The formal channels to verify the locations and status of nuclear forces have ceased to exist, forcing intelligence agencies to rely entirely on satellite imagery and other unilateral methods, which are more error-prone and easier to politicise. Nuclear and non-nuclear strategic systems are also entangled today and that, together with the premium both sides place on non-contact options like cyberattacks, can threaten nuclear command and control without crossing a nuclear threshold. This is why analysts have stressed the loss of predictability rather than the appearance of new warheads alone.
• New START’s expiry also makes the prospect of including China and other nuclear states in a larger nonproliferation regime harder in practice. Washington can now argue that it shouldn’t be the only state constrained while Beijing grows. Moscow can argue that it shouldn’t accept constraints while NATO’s aggregate capabilities shape its security environment. And Beijing has already argued that its arsenal is smaller than those of the U.S. and Russia and that therefore it’s “not fair or reasonable” to demand it enter their disarmament framework now.
• In 2025, Arms Control Association board chairman Thomas Countryman argued that the most realistic near-term path is a regime with three prongs: the U.S. and Russia establishing measures to restore basic level of transparency, the P5 group standardising definitions and modest transparency practices; and setting up of nonproliferation tools such as hotlines, launch notifications, incident prevention, and fissile material security, to involve more states without immediately forcing them to count each other’s warheads.

Source: The Hindu

India, GCC nations sign terms of reference for FTA

Context: Appropriate that we enter a robust trading arrangement for greater free flow of goods and services, and predictability, stability to policy: Goyal

• Representatives of India and the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) signed the Terms of Reference for negotiations on a free trade agreement (FTA).
• The GCC countries are together India’s largest merchandise trade partners, with total merchandise trade exceeding that done with even the EU and the U.S.
• The Terms of Reference (ToR) were signed by India’s chief negotiator for the FTA, Additional Secretary Ajay Bhadoo, and his counterpart representing the Secretariat General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Raja Al Marzouki. The signing of the ToR is a necessary precursor for the start of formal negotiations. The GCC countries are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
• “It is most appropriate that we now enter into a much stronger and robust trading arrangement, which will enable a greater free flow of goods and services, bring predictability and stability to policy, help encourage greater degree of investments and take our bilateral relations between the six nation GCC group and India to greater heights,” Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, who presided over the signing, said in his speech.
• Bilateral benefit
• Mr. Goyal pointed out that the two sides could significantly benefit from each other, with India’s workforce both within the GCC countries as well as in India standing to gain from the eventual agreement.
• “The GCC countries can help us with further diversification and growth of our energy sources, opportunities for our youth, and massive amounts of investments that different countries have already committed at different points of time, which will further get an impetus with a free trade agreement between India and the GCC nations,” he added.

Source: The Hindu

Bharat Taxi, India’s first cooperative-led ride-hailing platform

Context: Union Home, Cooperation Minister Amit Shah launched Bharat Taxi, India’s first cooperative-led ride-hailing platform, after a successful two-month pilot operation.

• The service has been initially launched in Delhi-NCR and Gujarat, and will be expanded across all States and Union Territories within two years.
• “In three years, Bharat Taxi will be rolled out across the country, from Kashmir to Kanniyakumari and Dwarka to Kamakhya.
• The profits will be shared with drivers associated with Bharat Taxi. Customers can hail cars, three-wheelers and two-wheelers through the platform.

Source: The Hindu