The post-Prelims week.
And what UPSC actually asked.

Editor's letter

There is a moment, every couple of years, when the week's news closes around a single event with such completeness that you can feel the rest of the country rearranging itself to fit. The week of 19 February was one such week. PIB carried five releases about the India AI Impact Summit before 9 PM on Thursday alone; another twelve trailed it on Friday and Saturday as ministries spelled out their downstream commitments. If you read only one release this week — read PRID 2230090, the inauguration text. It is the kind of release that becomes a Prelims question eighteen months later. (For reference, the last release that looked exactly like this — PRID 1888547, the National Green Hydrogen Mission, in January 2023 — became three separate Current Affairs questions across the 2023 and 2026 papers.)

The summit deserves the attention it received. 117 countries attended, 39 signed the New Delhi AI Impact Declaration, the next host is Vienna in 2027. India announced four India-side commitments, of which two — the Bengaluru AI Safety Institute and the Indian Languages AI Corpus Initiative — will almost certainly carry forward into next year's Cabinet approvals. Memorise the declaration name verbatim. Memorise the signatory count. Memorise the host alternation. The trap question that follows from this release will test exactly one of those three.

But the rest of the week mattered too, and that is what this digest is for. MILAN 2026 opened in Visakhapatnam — fifty-plus navies, host port Eastern Naval Command, theme worth memorising. The Cabinet quietly extended the National Mission on Edible Oils—Oil Palm to 2028, which is the kind of revenue-side decision that pairs neatly with old NMEO-OP questions from 2021. MoEFCC notified three new Ramsar sites — the running count is now 89, and you should know all three locations. The 21st of February fell on Saturday and as ever was International Mother Language Day; this year's theme bridged elegantly to Thursday's summit ("Multilingual education: a foundation for AI fairness"), and an alert examiner will join the two events.

Below: the week's 25 picks, grouped into five themes. Then the trap-watch we flagged through the week, consolidated. Then the four releases the engine did not catch and you should chase elsewhere. Then a list of what to expect in next week's edition.

Read it with tea on Sunday night, sleep with no FOMO Monday morning.

The week's most important fact, in one sentence: India hosted the second-ever AI Impact Summit, the New Delhi Declaration was adopted by 39 of 117 attending countries, and the next edition will be in Vienna in 2027.