As the vaccine development processes for Covid-19 are in the final phases, countries all around the world are preparing for its marketing and storage. In a recent session held by P Vaidyanathan Iyer – the Executive Editor National Affairs of Indian Express, Nandan Nilekani – the non-executive chairman of Infosys and a member of Indian National Congress introduced his strategic plan for the three-phased vaccine development and distribution process. His plan involves the implementation of a digital platform for a better outreach program of the novel vaccine.

He started by talking about the statistical challenges the government will have to cope up with. That includes ensuring that the vaccine reaches ‘entire 1.3 billion population of India’ in a span of 2 years. He quoted the example of introducing the Aadhar card system and enabling every Indian citizen to have a unique Aadhar number which was not easy and which took approximately 5 years to do so. He explained that vaccinating such a large population in little time would be difficult and hence, it is important to focus upon the betterment of infrastructure and architecture of the system. As a solution, he plans to introduce a digital platform to record the information and provide 10 million vaccinations per day to the Indian citizens.

Next, he talked about the present immunization scenario of the Indian healthcare system which is efficient in providing vaccinations to the children and pregnant women. The challenge is to develop an efficient program for adult vaccinations which does not exist as of now. He gives the example of the USA and how they have a successfully running immunization program for adults who get vaccinated every year against the Influenza virus, which makes it easier for them to provide the Covid-19 vaccine to all the US citizens including adults. Therefore, all the existing doctors and other healthcare workers will need to ensure to develop and distribute the vaccine at a fast rate to all the individuals of all age groups.

Summarizing his proposal, Nilekani suggested doing 8 to 10 million vaccinations per day by certified vaccinators which can be government-sponsored or developed by the private sector since the vaccinations are needed at a large scale and all must take active participation. A mobile or PC application shall be used in which all the essential details of the individuals would be stored along with the vaccinator’s name and agency. The app would be responsible for generating a digital certificate ensuring the individual’s vaccination that can be shared during interviews, at the airport, and in other places. It will also be responsible for reminding the individual for his/her second dosage of the vaccine and would give a reminder for the expiry of the vaccine and when the person needs to get vaccinated again.

He believes that this process will take place in three phases where in the first phase, the vulnerable population will be vaccinated first as limited vaccines will be available. In the second phase, the private sectors will be involved for a better reach of the vaccine. In the final third phase of the program, surplus vaccines would be available by 2022 hopefully, for which the planning should be concrete.

The author is a student member of Amity Centre of Happiness.