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.

India has achieved a historic milestone in healthcare by performing 20,138 organ transplants in 2025, crossing the 20,000-mark for the first time, according to the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation's (NOTTO) latest annual report. The achievement represents a 6.5 per cent increase over the previous year and a remarkable fourfold rise from 4,990 transplants in 2013, reflecting the rapid expansion of the country's transplant programme.

However, while the numbers are encouraging, health experts say one major challenge continues to limit lifesaving transplants: the shortage of deceased organ donors.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has appointed Smt. Monisha Chakraborty as Executive Director (ED) with effect from August 3, 2026. Prior to being promoted as ED, Smt. Monisha Chakraborty was serving as Chief General Manager in Charge in the Department of Supervision.

As a career central banker, Smt. Monisha Chakraborty has experience of over three decades in the Reserve Bank, having worked in the areas of supervision, foreign exchange, and government and bank accounts.

She was associated with a technical committee set up to review the format of the RBI’s balance sheet and profit and loss account. Smt. Chakraborty has also served as Banking Ombudsman.

As Executive Director, Smt. Monisha Chakraborty will look after the Foreign Exchange Department and Financial Markets Regulation Department. Smt. Monisha Chakraborty has a degree in Economics and a Master’s degree in Business Economics, both from Delhi University.

GIS major Esri India has signed a pact with Navratna central public sector enterprise Bharat Electronics to collaborate on defence projects and programmes involving geographic information systems, location intelligence and GeoAI, the company said on Monday.

BEL and Esri India have already delivered projects for the Indian defence services, and the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between them will further strengthen the collaboration.

Esri India Managing Director Agendra Kumar said geospatial intelligence has evolved from being a support capability to becoming a strategic decision advantage in defence, enabling commanders to see, analyse and respond with greater speed and precision.