The government on Monday introduced the Indian Statistical Institute Bill, 2026 in the Lok Sabha, proposing a new legal framework for the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) with a sharper focus on data science, frontier technologies and industry collaboration as India seeks to build a stronger data-driven economy.

The Bill seeks to replace the Indian Statistical Institute Act, 1959, while retaining ISI's status as an Institution of National Importance.

It proposes converting the existing society into a statutory body corporate with greater administrative and financial autonomy.

According to the Bill, the objective is to expand the institute's role beyond traditional statistics to create an ecosystem of high-quality statisticians and data scientists capable of supporting evidence-based policymaking through frontier technologies.

The Government has extended the tenure of Dr. T.V. Somanathan as the Cabinet Secretary by one year. The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved the one-year extension in the service of Dr. T.V. Somanathan, as Cabinet Secretary beyond 30 August 2026.

The ACC has also approved the tenure extension of Govind Mohan as the Home Secretary by one year.

On the occasion of International Clouded Leopard Day, India has reaffirmed its commitment to the conservation of one of Asia’s most elusive wild cats through the newly launched Clouded Leopard Conservation Action Plan (CAP). The action plan provides a comprehensive framework for securing habitats, restoring forest connectivity, strengthening scientific monitoring and empowering local communities for conservation of the species. Ministry of Environment, Forest, Climate Change noted that the action plan focuses on Habitat Protection, Scientific Monitoring, Landscape Connectivity and Community Participation across Northeast India.

The Ministry further added that a key component of the Action Plan is the identification of fourteen priority conservation landscapes across Northeast India, along with landscape-scale habitat restoration and corridor conservation to strengthen connectivity between forest habitats. It said that CAP provides for standardised scientific monitoring and promotes community-based conservation and sustainable livelihood support. Further, the action plan integrates climate resilience and adaptive management into conservation planning, strengthening the long-term resilience of Clouded Leopard habitats and landscapes.

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has projected GDP growth to 6.7 percent in this fiscal year, deciding to keep the Repo rate unchanged at 5.25 percent with neutral stance. RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra has said that country’s economic growth continues to be supported by resilient demand and it remains world’s fastest growing large economy. He said, country’s economy has performed better than expected in April-June quarter of this fiscal year.

Announcing the Monetary Policy Committee’s decision today, Mr. Malhotra said, RBI has decided to keep repo rate unchanged at 5.25 percent and retained a neutral stance. Repo rate is the interest rate at which the central bank lends short-term money to commercial banks against government securities.

He said, RBI has lowered CPI inflation projection to 5 percent from earlier estimate of 5.1 percent for financial year 2027. The Governor said the recent rise in inflation was largely driven by food and fuel prices rather than broad-based demand pressures.

The 13th BRICS Education Ministers’ Meeting and the 3rd BRICS Senior Officials’ Meeting will be held from today till August 7 in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The Education Ministry said that these meetings will bring together education ministers, senior officials and delegates from BRICS member countries.

During the meeting, they will deliberate on the topics of collaboration, including the following priority areas such as strengthening early childhood care and education, strengthening skill development and enhanced cooperation and promoting collaborative research, innovation and start-ups. Union Education Minister Prahlad Joshi will participate in the 13th BRICS Education Ministers’ Meeting.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has developed India's first fully annotated telomere-to-telomere (T2T) reference genome of pigeonpea (matar), which is expected to speed up the development of climate-resilient, high-yielding and nutritionally superior varieties of the country's second most important pulse crop.

As per reports, telomere-to-telomere sequencing is an advanced DNA sequencing and assembly method that creates complete, gap-free genomic sequences from one end of a chromosome to the other.

The genome sequence of the pigeonpea variety named 'Asha' has also been approved as the global reference genome, making it India's first fully annotated T2T reference genome for the crop, an official statement said.

Former Tripura and Bihar governor and education pioneer Dr D Y Patil died in Kolhapur on Tuesday. He was 90. Patil leaves an enduring mark in social, political and educational fields as well as that of sports.

Born on October 22, 1935, in Ambap, a small agrarian village in Kolhapur district, Dnyandeo Yashwantrao Patil carved a niche for himself primarily in the field of education.

Dnyandeo, popularly known as Dr D Y Patil, began his political career with the Congress but later stepped away from active politics to focus on education. He served as the mayor of Kolhapur from 1957 to 1962, and was elected as an MLA from Panhala constituency in 1967 and 1978.

Widely recognised in Maharashtra as Shikshanmaharshi, or visionary educationist, Patil held the additional charge of governor of West Bengal.

China has unveiled its first self-developed boring and blasting machine, named Xianglong, marking a new step in underground construction technology. The giant machine rolled off the production line at the China Railway Science and Industry Group's manufacturing base in Wuhan on August 1. It is designed to handle tunnels passing through difficult geological conditions by combining mechanical excavation with controlled blasting.

According to Xinhua, Xianglong is China's first integrated machine to combine the country's two main tunnel construction methods into a single system. The development is expected to fill a long-standing gap in equipment used for large infrastructure projects where changing rock conditions often slow construction.

The Supreme Court orally clarified on Tuesday that a direction banning mining activities within a 10 km radius of the Asan wetland conservation reserve, a Ramsar site in the State of Uttarakhand, would apply to other wetland conservation reserves across the country for the sake of parity.

“Wherever it is a community or a wetland conservation reserve, Asan [directions] will be applied. Wetlands are in a different category… We are conscious of the extent to which we are laying down parity. It is not that it [directions] would apply to Madhya Pradesh or would apply to West Bengal only…” Justice Joymalya Bagchi, part of the Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, observed.

The court was hearing an application filed by the State of Himachal Pradesh arguing that the 10-km radius restriction imposed in Uttarakhand should not apply to it.

Sticky “hairs” on two plant species in the Saxifraga genus led famed British naturalist Charles Darwin to wonder: Could some plants in this genus be carnivorous? He couldn’t prove it then, but more than 150 years later, scientists have shown that Darwin’s suspicions were correct.

Darwin proposed in 1875 that Saxifraga rotundifolia and S. umbrosa were insect-eaters; their hairlike structures called glandular trichomes ooze a sticky goo and resemble hairs found in some carnivorous plants. However, to be carnivorous, a plant must lure, trap and consume insects, and Darwin’s experiments with Saxifraga plants couldn’t conclusively demonstrate that the plants fit the bill.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers tested Darwin’s hypothesis by experimenting with Saxifraga candelabrum, a flowering mountain plant that grows at high altitudes on the southern part of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and in the Hengduan Mountains in China’s Yunnan and Sichuan provinces.