# Covishield

• Covishield, the vaccine candidate from the pune based Serum institute of India, was approved by a subject expert committee (SEC) of the Drug controller general of India.

• Covishield is likely to be practically available for use within the next week.

• Covishield is similar to the Oxford vaccine developed by Oxford university vaccine group, which was approved by the health regulator in the UK.

• Bharat Biotech has been asked to furnish more data demonstrating the efficacy of its candidate, “Covaxin”.

# GST collections

• Gross revenues from the GST hit a record high in December 2020.

• GST collections touch 1,15,174 crore rupees which is 12% higher than a year ago and 9.7% higher than the previous months inflows.

• December marks the fourth month in a row that GST collections have grown year on year after revenues collapsed in the first quarter of 2020-21.

• The 12% year on year growth recorded in December was the highest in 21 months.

# Aurangabad renaming row

• The Shiv sena in the MVA government in Maharashtra has proposed to change the names of Aurangabad city in Maharashtra to Sambhajinagar.

• Another part of MVA government in Maharashtra i.e congress has opposed this proposal of changing the name of the city.

# Affordable housing

• PM Modi laid the foundation stone of six light house projects in six cities as part of the global housing technology challenge – india (GHTC-INDIA) initiative.

• The aim of the programme is to built around 1000 houses each in Indore (MP), Rajkot (Gujarat), Chennai (Tamil Nadu), Ranchi(Jharkhand), Agartala and lucknow over a period of 12 months.

• Modern construction practices from countries such as France, Germany and Canada will be adopted.

# Automobile sales

• A majority of vehicle manufacturers ended 2020 on a positive note, registering good wholesale growth.

• Four wheeler market leader Maruti Suzuki India said it dispatched more than 1.4 lakh passenger vehicles to dealers in December 2020.

• It is a growth of 14.6% year on year.

• For two wheelers also, Hero motocorp saw domestic sales growth of 5% to 4.27 lakh vehicles.