Left Out Of CoWin

Context: Technocratic approach towards vaccination prioritises data collection over vaccine equity. There are privacy concerns too.

Issues with the technocratic approach of vaccination: While the CoWin portal has been launched by the government to digitise the vaccination drive, it is marred with the following issues:

• Exclusion: Mandatory provision based on age (18-44 years from May 1, in 3^rd phase) has a propensity to exclude people who are on the other side of the digital divide as well as for its inherent design issues.
  • According to the Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicator Report for October- December 2020, only 34.60% of the rural population subscribes to the internet.
  • Thus the majority of India’s rural population is being discriminated against, and a form of technical rationing is being implemented by CoWin based on broadband connectivity and digital literacy.
• Data Protection and cybersecurity: At present, vaccination slots on the portal are being released without any notice or schedule and are being snatched up within seconds.
  • Either through its official API or auto- mated scripts, a range of functionality is available for people to automate functions ranging from notification to even slot reservation.
  • This risks exposure of medical healthcare data through third-party providers.
  • The CoWin website has no privacy policy, even while India lacks a data protection law.
  • This is contrary to the Supreme Court’s right to privacy judgment but also to the departmental guidelines of the Government of India for official websites.
    • The departmental guidelines clearly state that government websites, when collecting personal data, “must incorporate a prominently displayed privacy statement...”.
  • Recently, the government tried to replace the biometric and iris scanning under Aadhar (in order to prevent infections) with face authentication, which still involves privacy risks.
    • Moreover, facial authentication is being piloted in a legal vacuum of a data protection law.
• Other technical barriers:
  • The use of Aadhar based authentication creates barriers for universalisation of vaccination with a worrying prospect of false-negative results, as it has demonstrated high error rates in the past.
  • Environmental factors, as opposed to ideal laboratory conditions, will further contribute to operational complexity.

Conclusion: The technocratic approach disregards the experience of public healthcare and digital rights experts. The present deployment of CoWin, rather than augmenting the right to health, is undermining it.