20th October 2025 Daily Current Affairs

🇮🇳 India & National

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) issued its October 2025 bulletin, stating that India’s economy remains resilient amid global uncertainty, inflation is easing, but foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are moderating.

The European Union Council announced a new strategy to deepen political, economic and security ties with India, signalling stronger cooperation across trade, technology and defence sectors.

Schools in several Indian states (including Bihar, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Delhi-NCR) declared a holiday on 20 October for the main Diwali celebrations.

The Nagaland Service Association announced continuation of its pen-down strike, pointing to unresolved employee grievances affecting administrative services in the state.

🌍 Global / International

In the U.S., Donald Trump and Anthony Albanese (Australia’s Prime Minister) signed an approximately US $8.5 billion rare-earths deal, reflecting strategic effort to secure critical mineral supply-chains and counter­s influence from China.

A major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted many global websites, apps and banking services following technical problems in its US region, spotlighting the fragility of cloud-infrastructure dependence.

The Ukraine-Russia war: Volodymyr Zelenskyy signalled he would join a potential summit with Trump and Vladimir Putin in Hungary if invited; concurrently the European Union confirmed it will phase out Russian gas imports by January 2028

🏷 Significance & Implications

The RBI’s assessment underscores India’s internal strengths (macroeconomic fundamentals) even as global headwinds persist. The moderation in FDI inflows may suggest caution among global investors.

The EU-India strategic push shows the growing importance of India in Indo-Pacific geopolitics, and could lead to deeper collaborations in tech, defence, supply-chains and trade.

The AWS outage serves as a reminder for businesses and governments to plan for cloud-service risk and redundancy—especially as digital dependency grows.

The rare-earths deal reflects how minerals such as rare earths are increasingly becoming strategic assets, not just economic commodities, given technology and defence uses.

On the domestic front, the continuation of the strike in Nagaland and the holiday for Diwali are reminders of how governance, celebrations and labour issues persist alongside macro-developments.

In global diplomacy, Ukraine’s positioning and the EU’s energy pivot reflect shifting alignments and the interconnectedness of war, energy and trade.