A current affairs plan for CLAT

Current Affairs, including General Knowledge, carries roughly 28–32 of CLAT's 120 questions. That is about a quarter of the paper, level with Legal Reasoning. It is also the one section you cannot rescue in October. English, logic and quant are skills that improve with practice at any point. Current affairs is a stock of knowledge, and you can only build it by reading steadily for months.

The good news is that the stock does not need to be huge. It needs to be organised. This guide gives you a system for the year, shows you how a CLAT GK passage is built, and ends with a sample passage to test the method.

How the section actually works

Every GK question in CLAT hangs off a passage of up to about 450 words, usually adapted from news or non-fiction writing. The passage introduces a topic: a law, a treaty, a scheme, a mission, a report. Then come several questions.

A few of those questions can be answered from the passage itself. Many cannot. They ask about something connected to the passage: the Article of the Constitution behind an institution, the city where an organisation sits, the year a treaty was signed, the body that publishes an index.

This has two consequences for your plan:

• Headlines alone are not enough. You need the background that sits behind each headline.
• Background is reusable. The Election Commission, the RBI, the UN Security Council and the Paris Agreement come back in the news every year. Learn them once, properly, and each new story becomes easy.

So your preparation has two tracks: a current track (what happened in the last year or so) and a background track (the institutions and concepts the news keeps returning to).

The period to cover

Most candidates cover roughly the twelve to fifteen months before the exam, with the most weight on major developments. Events in the last few weeks before the paper are less likely to appear, because the paper is set in advance, but you cannot rule them out.

For a December exam, a sensible window starts around the previous September or October and runs to November of the exam year.

The system

The daily look-up is the step most people skip, and it is the one that wins marks. If a story mentions the Finance Commission and you are not sure what it does, spend ten minutes finding out. That ten minutes will answer questions for years of news.

Categories to track

Sort every note into one of these. Each has its own guide with what to track and the background you need.

• National: laws passed, schemes, constitutional and statutory bodies, elections, federal questions. See national affairs for CLAT.
• International: summits, treaties, the UN system, India's relations.
• Legal: Supreme Court judgments, new laws, legal institutions. See legal current affairs.
• Economy: the Budget, RBI decisions, GST Council, trade.
• Science and technology: space missions, digital policy, health.
• Environment: climate conferences, conventions, protected areas.
• Awards, sports, appointments, reports and indices.

The background track

Build this alongside the news, not after it. A reasonable order:

1. The Constitution: Preamble, Parts III and IV, the main constitutional bodies and the Articles that create them.
2. Parliament and the executive: how a bill becomes law, money bills, ordinances, the President's role.
3. Institutions: RBI, SEBI, Election Commission, CAG, Finance Commission, NITI Aayog, NHRC.
4. International bodies: the UN and its principal organs, specialised agencies, G20, BRICS, SCO, ASEAN.
5. Environmental conventions: UNFCCC, Kyoto, Paris, Ramsar, CBD, Montreal.

The static GK guide and Constitution basics cover these in detail.

A sample CLAT-style passage

Read the passage, then answer. Note which questions come from the text and which need background.

The Election Commission of India is one of the few institutions that the Constitution itself creates and names. Article 324 vests in it the "superintendence, direction and control" of elections to Parliament, to the state legislatures, and to the offices of President and Vice-President. Elections to panchayats and municipalities are a different matter: they are conducted by State Election Commissions, which the Constitution provides for separately.

For its first four decades the Commission had only one member, the Chief Election Commissioner. It became a multi-member body for a short period in 1989, and has been a three-member body since the early 1990s. Decisions are taken by majority when the members differ.

Much of what voters associate with the Commission rests on convention rather than statute. The best example is the Model Code of Conduct, a set of guidelines for parties and candidates that comes into force when the election schedule is announced. It restricts, among other things, the announcement of new schemes by the government in power. The Code has no statutory backing, yet it is widely followed, largely because of the Commission's standing and its power to act under Article 324.

Conducting the poll is only part of the Commission's work. It registers political parties under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, recognises some of them as national or state parties, and allots election symbols under an order it issued in 1968. It also advises the President, or the Governor of a state, on whether a sitting legislator has incurred a disqualification, and it scrutinises the election expenses that candidates must disclose after the result.

The Chief Election Commissioner enjoys strong protection of tenure. He or she can be removed only in the manner and on the grounds applicable to a judge of the Supreme Court. How the members should be appointed, however, was long debated. In 2023 the Supreme Court held that, until Parliament made a law, appointments should be made on the advice of a committee including the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India. Parliament then passed a law later that year which provides for a selection committee of the Prime Minister, a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister, and the Leader of the Opposition.

Q1. Which Article of the Constitution vests the conduct of elections in the Election Commission?

(a) Article 280 (b) Article 356 (c) Article 148 (d) Article 324

Q2. Elections to a municipal corporation are conducted by:

(a) the State Election Commission (b) the Election Commission of India (c) the District Collector (d) the Ministry of Home Affairs

Q3. Which of the following statements about the Model Code of Conduct is supported by the passage?

(a) It is contained in the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
(b) It applies from the date of polling.
(c) It operates without statutory backing.
(d) It binds only opposition parties.

Q4. Under the 2023 law described in the passage, which office-holder is NOT a member of the selection committee?

(a) The Chief Justice of India (b) The Leader of the Opposition (c) The Prime Minister (d) A Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister

Q5. Article 280, which appears as an option in Q1, provides for:

(a) the Comptroller and Auditor General (b) the Finance Commission (c) the Union Public Service Commission (d) President's Rule

Answers:

1. (d) Article 324. Stated in the passage, and worth knowing without it.
2. (a) The passage says panchayat and municipal polls are run by State Election Commissions.
3. (c) The passage says the Code "has no statutory backing". (a) contradicts that; (b) is wrong because it applies from the announcement of the schedule; (d) is unsupported.
4. (a) The Chief Justice was part of the interim arrangement set by the Court, not of the committee under the 2023 law.
5. (b) Outside knowledge. The CAG is Article 148, the UPSC is Article 315, and President's Rule is Article 356.

Notice the pattern. Q2, Q3 and Q4 are reading questions. Q1 and Q5 reward someone who has learnt the Articles behind institutions. A candidate with good background gets all five in under three minutes.

Common mistakes

• Reading news without notes. Reading feels like progress, but without a written trace you will not revise it.
• Collecting too many sources. Three compilations do not beat one newspaper read properly. See what to read for CLAT current affairs.
• Skipping the background. A headline you cannot place in context is a fact you will forget.
• Starting late. Two months of cramming covers the news but not the background.
• Ignoring passages in practice. Answering one-line quiz questions is not the same as answering from a passage under time pressure.

What to do next

• Choose one newspaper and fix a daily reading time this week.
• Set up a notebook or file with the seven categories above.
• Learn the Articles for ten constitutional bodies this month.
• Do one GK passage set every weekend and mark each question "from passage" or "background".
• Read how CLAT current affairs passages work next.