Responding To Adversity With Achievement

Context: India has completed vaccination of 100 crore doses in just about nine months since starting vaccination programme. Even if each vaccination took just two minutes for a health-care worker. At this rate, it took around 41 lakh man days or approximately eleven thousand man-years of effort to reach this landmark.

Factors behind success of India’s vaccination drive

• Involving multiple sections of society: With citizens and Government coming together, vaccination drive transformed into a truly Bhagirath effort.
  • A total teamwork: Vaccination drive has shown the power of ‘Team India’ that is a big team of our 130-crore people.
  • Health-care workers traversed hills and crossed rivers across difficult geographies to vaccinate people.
  • Due to efforts of youth, social workers, healthcare workers, social and religious leaders, India faced minimal vaccine hesitancy compared to developed nations.
• Leveraging underlying social trust: For any effort to attain and sustain this speed and scale, the trust of all stakeholders is crucial.
  • Truly Aatmanirbhar: Viewed in the significant paradigm shift in people’s attitude towards ‘Made in India’ vaccines for COVID-19.
  • People’s trust in vaccine and process followed, discarding foreign brands despite various efforts to create mistrust and panic.
  • Trust in Democracy: Vaccination drive has demonstrated to whole world that ‘democracy can deliver’.
• Vigorous efforts of scientists and entrepreneurs: Our vaccine manufacturers, by scaling up to meet the demands of such a large population, made India Aatmanirbhar when it comes to vaccines. This is evident from the fact that
  • Only a handful of countries have developed their vaccines.
  • More than 180 countries are dependent on an extremely limited pool of producers.
  • Dozens of nations are still waiting for supply of vaccines even as India has crossed 100 cr doses!
• An equitable scheme and transparent processes: Government ensured that there is no VIP culture in vaccination drive even after lot of pressure from different interest groups.
  • Robust tech platforms like CoWIN, with real-time dashboard to boost transparency, QR-coded certificates ensured verifiability.
  • This ensured that the whole processes are equitable, scalable, trackable and portable according to demands of the people.
  • Eg: Poor workers could take the first dose in his village and the second dose of the same vaccine in the city where he works, after the required time interval.
• Role of Government – As an accelerator and enabler of progress: Government and Ministries partnered with vaccine makers right from day one and gave them support in the form of institutional assistance, scientific research, funding and accelerated regulatory processes.
  • Solid planning and preparation: Through constitution of expert groups and putting in place an effective road map right from April 2020.
  • Flexibility: ‘Whole of Government’ approach which at times act as bottleneck in the system was reformed and discarded.
• Ensuring Seamless logistics: Last mile delivery of vaccines is a complex process involving moving vial from plant in Pune/Hyderabad, to a hub in State, then to district hub and finally to vaccination centre.
  • Leveraging existing infrastructure: Through utilisation of over one lakh cold chain equipment.
  • States were given advance notice of delivery schedule of vaccines so that they could plan their drives better and vaccines reached them on the pre-decided days.

Conclusion: Success achieved in world’s largest vaccination drive will further spur youth, innovators, and all levels of Government to set new benchmarks of public service delivery. This achievement shall serve as a model not only for our country but for all world.