After months of wait, India is finally set to begin the largest vaccination drive in the country from January 16. As informed by the government earlier, healthcare workers and the frontline workers, estimated to be around 3 crores are going to be the first priority. They will be followed by those above 50 years and the under-50 population groups with co-morbidities numbering around 27 crores.

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As India gears up for COVID-19 Vaccine roll out, Centre on Sunday issued guidelines for the States and Union Territories on Co-WIN management.

The Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW) in a virtual conference today gave an overall view of the Co-WIN software and the principles that shall underpin the technology back-up for the vaccination exercise.

Ram Sewak Sharma, Chairman of Empowered Group on Technology and Data Management said that robust, dependable and agile technology shall form both the foundation and the back-up for the country’s COVID-19 vaccination which shall be the world’s largest immunisation exercise.

This is an unprecedented scale of immunization, the pointed out, saying that the process should be citizen-centric, and built on the approach that the vaccine shall be available anytime and anywhere.

The EG Chairperson underscored the critical importance of capturing the vaccination data in real time, stating that this was non-negotiable; while the posting of data on the portal may be online or offline in view of connectivity issues being highlighted by few states.

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He also critically highlighted the caution one needs to exercise to ensure that there are ‘no proxies’ at all; the beneficiaries need to be uniquely and undeniably identified.

Speaking on the use of Aadhar platform, he advised the States to urge the beneficiaries to seed their current mobile number with Aadhar for registration and consequent communication through SMS. He also advised the States and UTs that the data collection should meet the purpose of facilitating work and that needs to be validated at the field levels.