# Vaccine Development

• Prime minister Narendra Modi on 28th november visited the facilities of three biotechnology companies that are testing different Covid-19 vaccine candidates in India.

• Two of these vaccine candidates have begun phase 3 trials on thousands of volunteers and are expected to manufacture millions of doses in the first half of 2021 if the candidates pass regulatory muster.

• PM Modi visited Zydus cadilla’s manufacturing facility near Ahmedabad, its vaccine candidate Zycov-D is currently in last leg of 2nd phase trials. It is one of the few DNA based vaccine candidates in the world being in development process by Indian company Zydus-cadilla.

• PM also visited Bharat Biotech’s manufacturing facility in Genome valley, Hyderabad. It’s vaccine candidate namely “Covaxin” is in final phase of clinical trial being tested on 26,000 volunteers.

• PM Modi visited Serum Institute of India in Pune, which has partnered with pharma major Astrazeneca. Its vaccine  Covishield is probably going to be the first to get license for final distribution in India.

# SCO summit

• India will host the heads of government council meeting of the eight nation SCO on 30th november.

• PM Modi will not attend the meeting, so the meeting will be chaired by vice president M. venkaiah naidu.

• Pakistani PM will also not attend meeting and may be represented by their foreign minister.

# DDC polls in J&K

• The maiden elections to the District development council (DDC), the first electoral exercise in the union territory of Jammu & Kashmir since the abrogation of the special status last year.

• Elections recorded a peaceful 52% voting on saturday despite the cold weather and a snow cover in many constituencies.

• Other than local issues of development like, roads, electricity, school & drinking water, abrogation of article 370 & 35A was also a prime issue in the elections.

# New species found

• A new species of lizard, the smallest known Indian gekonid has been discovered in the eastern ghats.

• Studies show that the species belonged to the genus Cnemaspis.

• In India, 45 diverse species of Cnemaspis have been found, of which 34 are from the western ghats.

• Cnemaspis is one of several groups of gecko that we now know are very diverse and widespread over much of peninsular India.

# Others

• Uttar pradesh governor Anandi ben patel cleared the UP prohibition of unlawful conversion of religion ordinance,2020. This bill is popularly known as Anti-love jihad law.

• Rajasthan government slashed Covid-19 test rate for private labs from 1200 to 800 rupees per test for RT-PCR.