28th June 2026 Current Affairs MCQ

General Lakhera served as Governor of Mizoram from 2006 to 2011, alongside earlier stints as Lieutenant Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. His career reflects a long-standing pattern in Indian governance — senior military officers moving into gubernatorial roles, bridging civil and military leadership. Governors are appointed by the President under Article 155 and serve at the President's pleasure under Article 156, while Lieutenant Governors of Union Territories are appointed under Article 239 — a distinction worth keeping straight since exams often test which Article governs which office.

The 2026 World Cup is jointly hosted by three nations — the USA, Canada, and Mexico — the first time any World Cup has had three co-hosts. It's also the 23rd edition and the first to feature 48 teams, up from 32, which is exactly why this tournament introduces a Round of 32 as its opening knockout stage — previous 32-team World Cups jumped straight to the Round of 16. The final will be played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Worth remembering for exams: the first-ever Round of 32 match on 29 June saw co-host Canada beat South Africa, one of the tournament's early upsets.

HELINA is a helicopter-launched anti-tank missile, now achieving Initial Operational Clearance and being inducted into HAL Rudra helicopter units. Its infrared imaging seeker lets it engage targets at night or in poor visibility, and its lock-on-after-launch feature means the helicopter can manoeuvre away immediately after firing, cutting its exposure to enemy fire. This capability is particularly valuable along the Line of Actual Control, where terrain often favours helicopter operations over heavy artillery. It's part of a broader trio worth remembering together — HELINA, Akash (India's top defence export), and BrahMos (now integrated on 40 Su-30MKI jets) — reflecting India's shift from defence importer to active exporter.

Canada beat South Africa in the tournament's first-ever Round of 32 match — a fixture that exists only because of the World Cup's expansion to 48 teams. As a co-host nation, Canada had built up strong home support through the group stage, so their advancement carried extra weight for North American football's growth story. It's a good detail to hold onto for two reasons: it's the answer to "which match kicked off the Round of 32," and it ties directly into the bigger 48-team-format story that made a Round of 32 necessary in the first place.

India imported over 50% of its roughly 35 million tonnes of annual urea requirement in FY26 — a figure that hit new highs because of global supply disruptions. This is precisely the vulnerability the Green Urea Roadmap is designed to fix, since every tonne of natural gas-based urea needs 500-600 cubic metres of gas as feedstock, tying India's fertiliser security directly to volatile global gas markets. Reducing this import dependence isn't just an economic goal — it's also a strategic autonomy move, especially with West Asian energy disruptions like the Strait of Hormuz crisis making that vulnerability very visible through 2026.

The USA-Canada-Mexico joint World Cup bid wasn't just about football logistics — it was a statement that three nations with real bilateral tensions (immigration, trade) could still coordinate shared venues, security, and fan travel on a global stage. That's the same lens India is applying to its own ambitions: the 2036 Olympics bid, the 2028 World Athletics Indoor Championships in Bhubaneswar, and having already hosted the 2026 T20 Women's World Cup are all simultaneously sporting milestones and soft power projections — signals of organisational capacity and international standing. It's a useful frame for any exam question connecting sports current affairs to broader international relations themes.

The roadmap replaces natural-gas-derived hydrogen in the century-old Haber-Bosch process with green hydrogen — made by splitting water using renewable electricity through electrolysis. This matters because India is the world's second-largest urea consumer, importing over 50% of its roughly 35 million tonnes of annual demand, so every tonne shifted to green production chips away at that import bill. The transition is planned in phases — starting with a 5-10% green ammonia blend, scaling to 30-40% by 2030, and select fully green plants by 2035. It's also a direct extension of India's National Green Hydrogen Mission, which now gets a guaranteed industrial customer for the hydrogen it wants to produce.

Instead of using electricity to split water like green hydrogen does, nuclear-heat hydrogen taps the extreme heat — 700-800°C — generated by high-temperature reactors to drive a thermochemical process (like the sulphur-iodine or copper-chlorine cycle), splitting water without needing electricity at all. The big edge here is reliability: nuclear reactors run continuously regardless of weather, unlike solar and wind, so this pathway solves the intermittency problem that makes green hydrogen costs unpredictable. India's own three-stage nuclear programme, combined with its ANEEL thorium fuel work, means this pathway could eventually intersect with its Green Urea Roadmap. Think of grey, green, and pink hydrogen as three different "recipes" for the same ingredient, each with its own cost and reliability trade-off.

Article 324 gives the Election Commission of India superintendence, direction, and control over preparing electoral rolls and conducting elections — and the SC held that SIR is a legitimate use of that power, as long as it follows the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, with proper notice to affected voters. SIR itself is a more thorough, door-to-door version of the routine annual roll revision, used when significant inaccuracies are suspected. Petitioners had worried it could be misused close to elections to selectively disenfranchise voters, so this ruling essentially draws a legal line: the power is valid, but only when exercised with adequate procedural safeguards.

Intelligence inputs pointed to a possible paper leak, forcing the Maharashtra State Council of Examination (MSCE) to postpone at the last minute — affecting over 5 lakh candidates, many of whom had already travelled to their centres. What makes this sting more is the history: Maharashtra TET was already cancelled once in 2021 over a leak involving exam officials directly, so a repeat in 2026 raises real questions about whether post-2021 reforms were properly enforced. It sits alongside NEET-UG's own leak troubles the same year, pointing to a shared weak link — human intermediaries in paper distribution — that digital, encrypted delivery systems are meant to fix but haven't yet been scaled nationwide.