Disaster Management · 24 Jul 2026

Teesta VI tunnel Himalayan disasters

Consider the following Assertion (A) and Reason (R): Assertion (A): MeitY is considering a standalone law to regulate AI, separate from the IT Act, 2000. Reason (R): Section 79 of the IT Act's "safe harbour" principle was designed on the assumption that a platform is a passive host of content authored by a human user, an assumption that breaks down when AI systems themselves generate the content. Which one of the following is correct in respect of the above Assertion (A) and Reason (R)?

AOnly one
BOnly two
COnly three
DAll four

Tests the ability to precisely distinguish between similar recent disasters by location and cause, resisting the pull of a plausible-sounding but factually altered distractor.

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This question is based on: When an AI writes the defamatory line itself, who's actually liable - the platform or no one?
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About this question

Why in news

A methane gas explosion inside NHPC's under-construction Teesta Stage-VI tunnel in Sikkim killed 22 workers, despite NHPC's own 2024 technical paper having documented repeated gas fires in the exact same tunnel faces two years earlier.

Why for UPSC

UPSC increasingly tests clusters of recent disasters at the same or nearby locations, requiring aspirants to correctly distinguish cause, location and year rather than conflating similar-sounding Himalayan infrastructure incidents.

Prelims summary

The Teesta-VI methane blast (Sikkim, 2026), Silkyara tunnel collapse (Uttarakhand, 2023) and South Lhonak GLOF (Sikkim, 2023) are distinct recent Himalayan infrastructure disasters, each with a specific documented cause and location.

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