EC Agrees To Let Govt Use Its Data For Covid Vaccination Drive; Wants Data To Be Deleted Post Exercise

The Election Commission has decided to render "full assistance" in the vaccination drive starting tomorrow. But asked the government to ensure that the data is strictly used for the limited purpose.

With the mass vaccination drive starting tomorrow, the Election Commission has agreed to the request by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA)to let the government use the electoral roll data as the scale of Indian elections and the coronavirus vaccination drive are huge ang comparable.

News agency PTI quoted the sources saying "The Election Commission will extend "full assistance" to the government in identifying targeted beneficiaries at the polling station level for the COVID-19 vaccination drive, but wants health authorities to delete the data once the inoculation exercise is over."

As stated in the report, the Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla in December last year requested Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora to assist the government in identifying people above 50 years of age with the help of electoral data. The home secretary in a letter assured the poll panel that the government is complying with the current best practices for ensuring cyber security and that the data will be used only for the purpose of vaccination.

Responding to the application, the poll body earlier this month said that it has decided to render "full assistance" in the vaccination drive. But asked the government to ensure that the data is strictly used for the limited purpose.

The data should be deleted by health authorities once the vaccination exercise concludes, the officials said, as quoted by the sources in the report.

Around three lakh healthcare and frontline workers will be inoculated at 2,934 sites across India on the first day of the massive nationwide COVID-19 vaccination drive. India will launch its COVID-19 vaccination drive from January 16 in what Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called the world's largest inoculation programme.

Each vaccination session will cater to a maximum of 100 beneficiaries and the Union Health Ministry has advised states not to organize "unreasonable numbers of vaccination per site per day."