Current Affairs For UPSC Prelims and Mains

Reading and understanding Current Affairs for UPSC examination is a must. It is not only a requirement of IAS exam preparation but also a job requirement of an administrator to stay aware and understand the issues appearing in Daily Current Affairs, to handle them efficiently and effectively.

In the Civil Service examination, be it Prelims or Mains, the weightage of questions asked directly or indirectly from the daily current affairs has increased manifold over the years. In the Prelims examination, while UPSC is asking 20+ questions every year directly from monthly current affairs, the portion of the questions based on topics appearing in daily current affairs news is significant.

Below is the table describing the trend of direct current affairs for upsc questions asked by UPSC in Prelims examination.

Current affairs weightage in Prelims 2016-2020

we are providing Daily Current Affairs material for UPSC & IAS Exams

ForumIAS always providing daily Current Affairs study materials for free to the UPSC aspirants in the form of brief Current Affairs and Editorial. It is not a new initiative, Since its inception, ForumIAS is committed to providing, aspirants with the monthly current affairs material. ForumIAS has been one of the first platforms that started providing summaries and comprehensive analysis of the Daily Current Affairs for UPSC in the form of 9 PM brief and 7 PM Editorials.

For practice, ForumIAS started providing Current affairs based Mains Marathon for Mains Practice and current affairs based Prelims Marathon for Practice of prelims.

All our initiatives are, to this date are running consistently and successfully.  Lakhs of students have been benefitted from these current affairs initiatives and will keep on providing such benefits for many upcoming years.

Daily Must Read Current Affairs Articles

One of the challenges aspirants face is which article is important from the exam point of view. Our Must-Read Current Affairs Article Initiative Provides a list of the most important Current Affairs articles of the Day.

9 PM Daily Current Affairs Brief

Our daily 9 PM brief provides Daily Current Affairs summaries in notes format. In this initiative, our editorial team tries to make the task easier for you by sifting through 4 to 5 relevant newspapers such as The Hindu, Indian Express, Times of India, etc., skimming Current Affairs articles, and presenting the details in a concise form. These entire articles briefed and brought together for the day that we call as 9 PM Daily Brief. You don’t need to look anywhere more for your daily news bytes.

7 PM Daily Current Affairs Editorials 

For mains examinations, aspirants require an in-depth understanding of the daily issues appearing in Current Affairs. You need to understand the issue itself and its Causes, impacts, and way forward. Under this initiative, our editorial team provides you with an in-depth analysis of the most important daily current affairs issue in the news. You will be able to build an overall understanding of the issue by reading these news articles.

How to Prepare Current Affairs Notes For UPSC? 

Methods of Current Affairs Notes preparation: Techniques and methods of preparing current affairs notes differ from aspirant to aspirant. Some prefer handwritten notes, while others like to make online notes of current affairs for revision purposes. No method is the best one, the selection of the method totally depends upon the comfort level of an aspirant.

Limit sources of reading current affairs today: This is one of the crucial aspects of the Current Affairs Preparation. Aspirants sometimes start using so many sources for current affairs that it becomes impossible for them to cover everything important properly and unmanageable after reading that. Thus aspirants must limit their daily current affairs source to 3-4 only i.e. 1 good newspaper like Indian Express or The Hindu, PIB, 1 good current affairs compilation website like ForumIAS or any other website.

How long to read? Many aspirants spend 5-6 hours of their daily time on just reading newspapers and other sources of current affairs, leaving them with very little time to spend on the static part and their optional. Ideally, 2-3 hours should be more than sufficient to read current affairs today
thoroughly.

How to read current affairs? If you go through the question papers of UPSC asked in the previous years, simply reading the news will not help to crack this examination. You should also read the aspects around the topic of the news and should not involve yourself in political debates. You should try to find out the background of the issue, Socio-Economic-Political-Environmental impacts of the issue, reasons behind the issue, and solutions for that. For example:

If you are reading an issue related to Compensation Cess, Other than the conceptual aspects of the compensation Cess, you must read: –

• Background of the issue i.e. covers from the intro of GST and the commitments made by centre to states regarding Compensation cess to present.
• Provisions in the constitution, related to the division of financial powers between centre and states
• Reasons for shortfall in Compensation cess
• Cover Impacts of the shortfall from different dimensions, for example:  On the federal structure, on the Socio-economic status of states, etc.
• Recommendations and way forward by economists and experts