As India achieved the landmark of administering 100 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses on Thursday, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of National Health Authority (NHA) Dr RS Sharma lauded the role of CoWIN app in this accomplishment saying that it made the entire process smooth, orderly and transparent.
Speaking to ANI, Dr RS Sharma explained the journey of CoWIN in accomplishing the landmark and said that the indigenous app ensured tracking of every dose of vaccine in real-time with the collaboration between the Centre and states and the private sector.
"CoWIN platform has played an extremely important role in ensuring smooth COVID-19 vaccination drive of our country, which has crossed 1 billion. It is really a moment of pride for all of us, and also it is a result of the continuous hard work of more than nine months by our doctors, field workers, administrators, and everybody. They have shown a huge amount of commitment and undying spirit to basically make this happen. So we are very proud of that," Sharma said.
"CoWIN played an extremely important role in the COVID vaccination journey by making the entire process absolutely smooth, orderly and transparent. It has successfully integrated both the private sector and public sector vaccination centres across India. It provided a platform where they can register and book appointments to get vaccinated, get the digital certificates, record the AEFI. Everything is happening digitally. There is no platform in the world, which has scaled up so fast, so quickly, in nine months. So I think, we are very proud of it," he said.
Speaking on the ease of using the platform, Dr RS Sharma said, "When we design an IT system, one should keep the problem in mind for which we are finding a solution. We took all the steps to ensure that people should easily be able to register to this platform. They just need a mobile phone. Even through a single mobile phone, one can register four people and can get appointments separately for all four of them. The beneficiaries can immediately get the vaccination certificate, which can be stored in mobile or can be mailed to anybody."
"I think this whole process was designed to be inclusive. I think overall we have tried to ensure that CoWIN becomes a very robust, scalable and open-source platform. It is also open because there are hundreds of partners who have worked with us and who have integrated their applications with us. I think overall we have restructured this platform based on open API, open standards, open-source which has made it inclusive, transparent, more scalable and speedy," he explained.
Reacting to the fact that other countries are also using CoWIN or are adopting CoWIN for their contexts, the NHA CEO said, "Earlier in April, we had decided that we will gift the CoWIN to the countries who want to use it once it is stabilised. We will open-source it. On July 5, we held a global conclave where more than 100 countries participated. In the global conclave, we made it open source, we created documentation."
"We also trained people and consultancy firms who can actually help the other countries in implementing the platform. We have given those firms certificates of competence and training. And then, now with the Ministry of External Affairs, we are in conversation with a number of countries, and we are on the verge of signing the MOU's with some countries," he added.
( With inputs from ANI )
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