At a time when India is struggling with rising number of dengue cases with each passing year, the Mexican government has approved the world’s first anti-dengue vaccine which is designed to protect people in the 9-45 age group from nine to 45 years from all four subtypes of the virus.

Called Dengvaxia, the vaccine has been developed by France-based Sanofi Pasteur and is the result of an extensive clinical development programme running for almost two decades.

“Today, with this first marketing authorisation of Dengvaxia, we have achieved our goal of making dengue the next vaccine-preventable disease,” said Olivier Brandicourt, Sanofi’s managing director and CEO said on Wednesday. “This is a historic milestone for our company, for the global public health community and, most importantly, for half the world’s population who lives at risk of dengue,” he added

Kerala is expected to be declared the first digital State in the country shortly, on the strength of its digital infrastructure and e-governance initiatives. Discussions are on to get Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make the declaration, Chief Secretary Jiji Thomson said here on Thursday.

Delivering the inaugural address at the Knowledge Sharing Summit organised by the Kerala State IT Mission and Computer Society of India, he said the State had succeeded in leveraging ICT for economic growth and making government services affordable and accessible for the masses. Bridging the digital divide is our priority, he said.

Mr. Thomson highlighted several initiatives under the Digital Kerala programme. Principal Secretary, IT , P.H. Kuriansaid the high mobile and Internet penetration and the increasing use of smart phones had hastened the evolution of Kerala as a digital society.

In what may be a precedent preventing illiterate persons from participating in grass roots democracy, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a Haryana State law mandating that only those having “minimum” educational qualifications will be eligible to contest panchayat elections in the State.

The other grounds for disqualification from contesting polls under the Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act, 2015 are failure to pay arrears to any primary agriculture co-operative society or agriculture co-operative banks, failure to pay electricity bill arrears and not having a functional toilet at home.

The “minimum” education required for eligibility to contest in a panchayat election is completion of matriculation in case of general candidates; completion of Class 8 for a woman candidate or a candidate belonging to Scheduled Caste; and completion of Class 5 pass for a Scheduled Caste woman candidate contesting for the post of ‘Panch’.

The law leaves 68 per cent of the Scheduled Caste women and 41 per cent of the Scheduled Caste men in Haryana ineligible to contest panchayat elections. The judgment may become a rallying point for other States also to amend their laws in the same fashion.

The verdict by a Bench of Justices J. Chelameswar and Abhay Manohar Sapre agrees that the Haryana law creates “two classes of voters,” that is, “those who are qualified by virtue of their educational accomplishment to contest the elections to the panchayats and those who are not.”

But Justice Chelameswar, who authored the verdict, reasons there is nothing “irrational or illegal or unconnected” if the law prescribes minimum educational qualification for candidates. Simply put, the court feels that basic education would “enable the candidates to effectively discharge duties of the panchayat.”

“It is only education which gives a human being the power to discriminate between right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, prescription of an educational qualification is not irrelevant for better administration ,” Justice Chelameswar reasoned.

The court completely agreed with Attorney-General Mukul Rohatgi’s submissions during the hearings that the law was meant to elect “model representatives for local self government for better administrative efficiency.”

The apex court failed to find any merit in the argument of three women candidates, spurned by Haryana’s new poll law and who moved the Supreme Court, that “people do not choose to be illiterate.”

Those with minimum educational qualification alone can contest polls