Daily Current Affairs · Last published 11 September 2026
UPSC Prelims Current Affairs: 11 September 2026
RBI and SEBI launch a tokenised bonds pilot, India and France sign new space deals, and Xi Jinping confirms his BRICS summit visit.
RBI and SEBI launch Demat 2.0 pilot for tokenised corporate bonds
Reserve Bank of India Governor Sanjay Malhotra and Securities and Exchange Board of India Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey launched the Demat 2.0 pilot for tokenised corporate bonds at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai on 10 September 2026. Three companies issued tokenised bonds under the pilot using distributed ledger technology, REC Limited and Larsen & Toubro each raising Rs 500 crore and IIFL raising Rs 25 crore, taking the total to about Rs 1,025 crore. Settlement for the tokenised bonds uses the central bank digital currency, the digital rupee issued by the RBI, which the regulators said allows faster and more transparent transactions than the conventional demat system. SEBI said the tokenisation framework could later extend beyond corporate bonds to equities, mutual fund units and electronic gold receipts.
RBI Governor unveils UPI Tap and Pay and the AI powered MyUPI platform
At the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai on 10 September 2026, RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra unveiled UPI Tap and Pay, which lets users make near field communication based UPI payments by tapping a compatible smartphone on a point of sale terminal, permitting PIN less transactions up to Rs 5,000. The National Payments Corporation of India also launched MyUPI, a unified window showing a user's UPI transactions and Autopay mandates across banks and apps, including a Safety Switch that lets a user instantly decline UPI debit transactions if they suspect their account is compromised. Underlying these features is FiMI, Finance Model for India, a domain specific language model NPCI built to natively understand India's payment systems, transaction disputes and mandate management. Malhotra said trust takes years to build but can be lost quickly, and urged fintech firms to guard against risks from opacity, exclusion and cybersecurity.
India and France sign three private sector space agreements at the Paris Space Summit
India and France signed three space sector agreements at the International Space Summit held in Paris on 9 and 10 September 2026, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed by video conference. France's Safran Space and India's Dhruva Space signed a contract worth more than 5 million euros for surveillance technologies that will feed into India's planned Space Based Surveillance constellation of 52 satellites, to be deployed between 2027 and 2030. Separately, France's U Space and India's AXISCADES signed a commercial cooperation agreement to jointly develop India's microsatellite market under the Make in India framework. Both agreements build on more than five decades of cooperation between the Indian Space Research Organisation and the French space agency CNES.
UIDAI says it is working to make Aadhaar interoperable internationally
UIDAI Chief Executive Officer Saurabh Vijay said at a fireside chat during the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai that the authority's focus is now on making Aadhaar interoperable internationally, with proof of concept projects already under way and the legal framework being adapted to support this. Vijay said UIDAI is also working on policies that would let Overseas Citizens of India use Aadhaar to ease investment into the country, and is developing a lighter product called Aadhaar Lite with guidelines to follow soon. Separately, UIDAI Chairman Neelkanth Mishra said at the same event that Aadhaar authentications, currently around 100 million a day, are being scaled to handle 250 to 300 million a day, and UIDAI launched a new Aadhaar face authentication software development kit letting partner banks run verification on their own servers.
Net SIP inflows hit a record share of gross investment in FY26 despite account closures
Net inflows through Systematic Investment Plans reached about Rs 2 lakh crore in the 2025 to 2026 financial year, 56 per cent of the roughly Rs 3.5 lakh crore in gross SIP investments, the highest share in at least three years, according to data drawn from the Securities and Exchange Board of India's annual report. The strong net figure came even as SIP account closures rose during the year, implying outflows of about Rs 1.5 lakh crore did not translate into a sharp spike in redemptions. Mutual fund industry officials attributed the resilience to a growing long term investment mindset among retail investors, with the share of SIP investments older than five years rising to 31 per cent as of March 2026.
Xi Jinping confirmed to visit India for the 18th BRICS Summit, his first trip in seven years
Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to visit India for the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September 2026, his first visit to India in nearly seven years since the 2019 informal summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mamallapuram. A bilateral meeting between Xi and Modi is on the cards on the margins of the summit, which would follow their meeting in Kazan, Russia in 2024 on the sidelines of the 16th BRICS Summit. Indian officials have called for stable and predictable India China ties ahead of the visit, and India, as the 2026 BRICS chair, is positioning the grouping as a complementary, development oriented forum rather than one adversarial to other blocs, while planning to sidestep contentious proposals such as a common BRICS currency.