Current Affairs 19 August 2026

India Launches First-Ever Grasslands Guide at UNCCD COP17.

• India launched its first-ever Guide to Grasslands and Other Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs) at UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
• The guide was released by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC).
• It maps major grasslands, savannas, deserts, scrublands and coastal ecosystems across India.
• The guide was developed by ATREE in collaboration with IUCN, ICFRE and SAC-ISRO.
• It aims to support India’s Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets.
• It highlights the ecological and economic importance of pastoralism, fire ecology and carbon sequestration.

India Sets Up Committee for Teesta Barrage Project.

• The Indian government has constituted a 12-member committee to examine the restoration and future management of the Teesta Barrage Project (TBP).
• The committee is headed by the Chairman of the Central Water Commission (CWC).
• It includes Joint Secretary-level representatives from Sikkim and West Bengal.
• The committee will submit its comprehensive report within six months.
• It will assess siltation, water availability and current water utilisation in the Teesta basin.
• It will recommend measures to strengthen the barrage and related infrastructure.
• The panel will also develop climate-resilient strategies and assess climate-change impacts on the basin.
• It will examine measures related to Gajaldoba Barrage and upstream dams to improve drainage-channel capacity.

SEMICON India 2026 Scheduled to Be Held in New Delhi.

• SEMICON India 2026 will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 17, 2026, at Yashobhoomi, New Delhi.
• The event will be held from September 17–19, 2026, with the theme Silicon to Systems: Building the Ecosystem.
• It is jointly organized by ISM, MeitY and SEMI.
• Over 500 exhibitors from 40+ countries will participate, including 294 international firms.
• The event will feature 6 country pavilions and 10 state pavilions.
• Key focus areas include AI, digital transformation and supply-chain resilience.
• A new Sand to Silicon to Systems value-chain experience will be introduced.
• Under the Semicon India Programme, 12 projects have been approved under Semicon 1.0, while Semicon 2.0 has also been approved.

Defence Ministry Unveils Sixth Positive Indigenisation List.

• The Ministry of Defence notified the 6th Positive Indigenisation List (PIL) on August 18, 2026.
• The list contains 405 strategically important defence items.
• 16 items are for the Indian Coast Guard, while 389 items are for DPSUs.
• The items have an estimated business potential of ₹3,070 crore.
• The list covers LRUs, sub-systems, components, spares and raw materials.
• Over 15,700 defence items have been indigenised in the last five years.
• This has led to approximately ₹9,000 crore in import substitution.
• Details of the items are available on the SRIJAN Portal to encourage industry participation.

Razorpay Unveils AI-Powered Payment Model "Vulcan".

• Razorpay launched Vulcan, India’s first transformer-based AI foundation model for payments, on August 18, 2026.
• Developed in partnership with NVIDIA and AWS using Amazon SageMaker.
• Designed to improve payment success, fraud detection and transaction routing.
• Increased payment success rates by up to 10%.
• Detected 8× more international card fraud and 5× more fraudulent/disputed transactions.
• Trained and deployed across around 3 trillion data points from Razorpay’s payments network.
• Its real-time intelligence layer selects the most efficient payment gateway for each transaction.