UPSC/KPSC Current Affairs: 4th December 2025

• ‘States will have to abide by terms of Samagra Shiksha to receive funds’

Context: Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan reiterated the Centre’s position that all States will have to abide by conditions laid under the Samagra Shiksha to receive funds.

• Answering a question raised by Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas asking for reasons for withholding/ delay in releasing the Central share, Mr. Pradhan in a written reply said: “The release of Central share depends on the submission of the utilisation certificates, audit reports in respect of funds released earlier, physical and financial progress reports, State contributions and compliance with the scheme norms.”
• During the Question Hour, Mr. Brittas cited dues worth ₹1,160.52 crore since 2022-23 under the Samagra Shiksha scheme.
• The scheme was launched in 2018 while the National Education Policy (NEP) was launched in 2020 and the PM-Shri in 2022. He asked if the States were being compelled to accept NEP 2020 or the 2022 scheme as a condition for receiving funds under a 2018 scheme and termed it “arm-twisting”.
• Mr. Pradhan, responding to him, accused Mr. Brittas of “misleading” the House and said it was not a partisan policy. He said non-BJP ruled States like Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab and Telangana were getting funds under the scheme.
• The Minister said the government was ready to release all pending dues, subject to fulfilment of the conditions of implementation of NEP.
• In a supplementary question, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s R. Girirajan asked Mr. Pradhan on when the Centre plans to release Tamil Nadu’s dues. The Minister did not directly respond to the question. He instead pointed to the Supreme Court’s recent observations in response to a public interest litigation (PIL) plea, urging the Union and the Tamil Nadu governments to have talks on the issue of establishing Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) in the State.
• “Tamil Nadu can’t put conditions, saying this much we will implement, this much we will not implement,” he said.

• NCBC suggests exclusion of 35 communities from West Bengal’s Central OBC list

Context: Even as the Supreme Court is hearing matters related to Muslim communities populating West Bengal’s State OBC lists, the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) has now recommended to the Union government to exclude 35 communities from the State’s Central OBC list, most of which are Muslim.

• “This recommendation was made in continuation of the NCBC’s scrutiny of West Bengal’s OBC list in light of a high number of Muslim communities being listed as OBCs.
• Most of the communities in the list of 35 recommended for exclusion are such Muslim communities. One or two of them may be non-Muslim communities,” said Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, under whose chairpersonship the recommendation was made. West Bengal is months away from its next Assembly election.
• Mr. Ahir, whose tenure as NCBC chairperson ended on December 1 this year, spoke to The Hindu after the Social Justice Ministry told Parliament this week that the Commission had tendered its advice to the government to exclude 35 communities from the Central OBC list of West Bengal. Mr. Ahir, however, refused to specify the communities recommended for exclusion, saying: “That is a matter for the government to decide.”
• The recommendation to exclude these communities came months after the NCBC initiated a probe into 37 communities included in the Central OBC list of West Bengal in 2014, just ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.
• Of these, 35 were Muslim communities. Responding to direct questions about the NCBC’s scrutiny of these 37 communities in Lok Sabha, the Social Justice Ministry said on Tuesday that 35 communities had been recommended for exclusion from West Bengal’s Central OBC list.
• The government said the NCBC tendered its advice on the exclusions in West Bengal in January this year.
• The Ministry is in possession of NCBC advice for inclusion and exclusion in Central OBC lists of nine States.
• Centre is not considering any proposal to classify denotified tribes, RS told

Context: Five years after the Union Government initiated an ethnographic effort to classify 268 denotified, nomadic, and semi-nomadic tribes who were thought to have never been classified before, the Union government told Parliament on Wednesday that it is not considering any proposal to classify these communities into Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and OBC categories afresh.

• This comes two years after the Anthropological Survey of India completed the ethnographic study of these communities and recommended their reclassification.
• In their report submitted in 2023, the AnSI had recommended fresh classification of 85 of these communities, reclassification of nine others, and noted that many others were only partially classified.
• This exercise was initiated in 2019 after the government constituted the Development Welfare Board for Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Communities (DWBDNC). This board was set up following the Idate Commission’s report of 2017, which had also flagged the need for these communities’ proper classification into SC, ST, or OBC lists, as have previous Commissions that have looked into denotified communities.
• While setting up the board, the government entrusted the task of classification of these communities to a NITI Aayog panel, which had commissioned the Anthropological Survey of India to study them.

Pressure for quota

• Responding to questions in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday about this study and the government’s plans to finalise the classification of these communities, the Social Justice Ministry said, “There is no proposal under consideration.”
• This comes even as civil society organisations representing the denotified communities in north India have been pushing the government to recognise them as a separate scheduled category akin to SCs, STs, and OBCs. Their rationale has been that very few States were issuing community certificates to these communities, in the absence of which, they are unable to claim benefits meant for them.
• The Ministry said that the Development Welfare Board was already administering the SEED scheme for the welfare of all denotified, nomadic, and semi-nomadic communities. However, officials of the Board have told The Hindu previously that a major reason for the slow uptake of the SEED scheme was the lack of clarity on how to classify these communities.
• Gyanesh Kumar takes charge at International IDEA council  

Context: Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Wednesday assumed charge as Chairman of the Council of Member States of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) for 2026.

• In his acceptance speech at Stockholm, Sweden, Mr. Kumar highlighted the scale of India’s democratic exercise, noting that the country has over 900 million electors across 28 States and eight Union Territories.
• In the 2024 General Election, India witnessed a breathtaking democratic spectacle in which over 20,000 candidates from 743 political parties, including six national and 67 State parties, participated, he said.

• Man-animal conflict frays India’s wildlife conservation principles

Context: India’s countryside continues to witness a deepening crisis of human-wildlife conflict, with increasing instances of wild animals straying into farmland and towns that often result in deaths of both wildlife and people, and calls to ‘contain’ animal numbers.

• In many parts of Assam, Odisha, Karnataka and other States, farmers now regularly report herds of wild elephants entering paddy, sugarcane or banana fields during the night.
• According to a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), this kind of human-wildlife conflict has become “one of the main threats to the long-term survival of many emblematic species in India.”
• As India’s infrastructural footprint expands, natural habitats shrink and become fragmented. That fragmentation forces animals to cross into human-dominated landscapes in search of food or migration routes, raising the odds of conflict.
• About 186 elephants were killed after being hit by trains across India between 2009-10 and 2020-21, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC).
• As per the data furnished by the Project Elephant Division of the Ministry, Assam accounted for the highest number of elephant casualties on railway tracks (62), followed by West Bengal (57), and Odisha (27).
• “Within a human lifetime, we have witnessed extraordinary and unprecedented changes to our planet,” warns Margaret Kinnaird, Global Wildlife Practice Leader at WWF Global. “Human–wildlife conflict, in tandem with other threats, has decimated species that were once common — and pushed rarer ones to the brink.”
• Agriculture near forests draws elephants into human fields, increasing conflict. Villages in the vicinity of several tiger reserves in India have seen instances of crop raids by nilgai, deer and bison, prompting calls by angry locals to declare these species as ‘vermin’.
• Meanwhile, sensitive scavengers such as vultures suffer silently. Once numbering in the tens of millions across South Asia, several vulture species have seen catastrophic declines — over 95% in some species — driven by a combination of habitat disruption, poisoning from veterinary drugs, and disturbance around their traditional carcass-feeding sites. Without vultures to dispose of animal carcasses, rural India has witnessed a rise in rotting carcasses, stray dogs, and associated public health risks.
• Recognising the urgency, the Centre has rolled out a national-level strategy. The National Human-Wildlife Conflict Mitigation Strategy and Action Plan seeks to address key drivers of conflict — habitat fragmentation, damaged corridors, and retaliatory killing — by promoting mitigation measures, data-driven monitoring, and stronger habitat protection.

• Higher duties on cigarettes will be shared with States: FM

Context: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman clarified that the tax hikes she was proposing on cigarettes was not a cess but an excise duty, which would be part of the divisible pool of taxes that are shared with the States.

• The Lok Sabha passed the Central Excise (Amendment) Bill, 2025.
• Delivering her reply to the debate on the Bill in the Lok Sabha, Ms. Sitharaman said that the duty on cigarettes had been higher in the pre-Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime. It was then reduced to a “nominal” rate under GST as cigarettes also attracted a compensation cess.
• With that compensation cess set to be withdrawn soon once the government repays the interest on loans it had taken to compensate states during the pandemic period, the Centre has introduced this Bill to increase the base excise duty on cigarettes so that the tax incidence on them does not fall.
• “This is not a new law, this is not an additional tax or something that the Centre is taking away,” Ms. Sitharaman said.
• “Many MPs here observed that this is a cess. This is not a cess, this is excise duty. Excise duty existed before GST. The amount will be redistributed to the States as per the Finance Commission’s recommendations.”
• The Finance Minister also sought to address some MPs’ concerns that the new tax would increase the price of beedis and thereby harm the lakhs of beedi workers in the country.
• “There is no change in the tax incidence on beedi,” the FM clarified. “Not even a single paisa of tax has been increased.”
• Ms. Sitharaman also spoke about how tax rates on tobacco were increased annually in the pre-GST period, and how tobacco farmers needed to move away from growing tobacco. “Efforts have been made in the past and continue to be made to raise awareness among farmers about the harms of tobacco farming,” she explained.
• “Under the National Agricultural Development Scheme, the crop diversification programme has been covering 10 major tobacco-producing states—Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal — since 2015, and other efforts have been ongoing for decades.”
• She said between 2018 and 2021-22, more than 1.12 lakh acres of land were shifted away from tobacco cultivation to other crops.