'Every three out of five people in rural areas participated on first day of India's centralised free vaccination policy'

By Joymala Bagchi
New Delhi [India], June 23 : Since the introduction of India's new centralised free vaccination policy, out of the over 8.6 million doses Covid-19 vaccines administered in the country, more than half went to innoculate people in rural India.
The ratio of rural and urban participation on Tuesday was 60:40 percent. The calculation was made based on vaccination centers that are located in rural India.
As per the Union health ministry, 1,08,949 vaccinators logged into Co-WIN on June 21 to facilitate the inoculation of 8.6 million Indians.
RS Sharma, CEO, National Health Authority told ANI, "Rural India is participating on a major scale. 30 crore people have been vaccinated and they are not the urban elite, there are people from rural India also. Yesterday I saw the figure, though we are not putting on the portal but I think we should start putting them also. The ratio was 60 per cent of rural participants."
In furtherance Sharma stated, "There were queries from various quarters and also as per the direction of the Supreme Court, we should separately count the rural people also. We are not collecting the address of the people, we are collecting whether vaccination centres are located in rural areas or not."
Mostly, it has been seen that vaccination centres cater to people at a localised level based on whether it's in urban or rural area, he said.
"However even if there is a migration from one place to another, it will cancel out. And in that way we can have fairly a reasonable figure of rural population being vaccinated from where we have the break ups of rural and the urban. I was told that yesterday three out of five people were from rural areas," said Sharma.
Earlier with digital division sharply existing in India, in interior parts of the country, voice of dissatisfaction wad raised regarding vaccine registration following poor internet connectivity.
It has been stated earlier that almost 53 per cent of vaccination centers in India are in rural parts of the country.
Some of the south African countries have expressed their interest in CoWin, especially to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
In order to apprise them of how CoWin was developed and what are the attributes, an international conference on CoWin is scheduled to take place on July 5.
"We are expecting a large participation," added Sharma.
Regarding change in software since the revamp of the vaccine policy Sharma said, "There are two types of changes happening. One is the policy of vaccination such as age, free of cost which we keep on plugging into the software and second is the user interface of the software such as pricing, making the whole thing transparent."
CoWin yesterday hit a peak of 1.83 million application programming interface (API) calls per minute at 12:04 pm which specifies handling over 30,000 API calls per second.
Cowin has integrated over 12 languages to help it's users for a better and easy understanding. Around 80 pc of the population have been vaccinated through walk ins in the country.
The centralised free vaccination policy began on Monday (June 21) under which the government will provide free COVID-19 vaccine to all Indian citizens above 18 years of age.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the announcement in a televised address to the nation and said the central government would take over the nationwide vaccination drive, and the Centre would procure 75 per cent of vaccines and give them to states for free distribution to all citizens above the age of 18.
The Centre will also handle the 25 per cent vaccination that was with states till now under the liberalised plan announced earlier.
In a briefing on Friday, the health ministry had said states would be playing a facilitatory role by aggregating demand and vaccination capabilities of private hospitals in the state and ensure the administrations of vaccinations.
"There will be a systematic flow of vaccines to the private sector as well. I am hopeful that in this way, there will be a lot of energy in the participation of the private sector and vaccination sites will increase," Dr VK Paul, Member, Health of the Niti Aayog said.
From June 21 (International Day of Yoga), the Centre will provide free vaccines to states," PM Modi said.