Around 50 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Panama, have paid heed and designated their interest in having a Co-WIN system to operate their vaccination drive. On Monday, a senior official said, India is set to share the open-source software for free of cost.
Dr R S Sharma, the chairman of the empowered group for the Covid-19 vaccine administration stated that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ordered officials to devise an open-source version of the platform and provide it for free of cost to any country that requires it. ” One of the silver linings of the Corona period is that we are at ease with digital consultation. The most important outcome of this is going to be the generation of data for researchers and academics,” Sharma said.
“The Cowin platform has become so widespread that as many as 50 countries from Central Asia, Latin America, Africa all displayed their interest in having a Co-win like system,” Sharma stated at the second Public Health Summit 2021 on ”Emerging Imperatives in Strengthening Public Health for India” arranged by Confederation of Indian Industry.
He also said a virtual global conclave of health and technology experts from across the world will be held on July 5 where India will share how this system works.
“We are telling the world how this system can work and how we are ready to share an open source software with any country free of cost. There have been huge interests starting from Canada, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Nigeria, Uganda,” he said.
Some sources said other countries such as Vietnam, Iraq, Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates have also manifested interest in comprehending the Co-WIN platform for executing it in their own countries to run their Covid programmes.
In five months, Sharma said, Co-WIN has grown to control 30 crore plus registrations and vaccinations.
“It is a citizen-centric platform and provides a single source of truth till the district level. From the beginning, it was ensured that the platform can be easily used to schedule, reschedule and cancel appointments,” he said.
Sharma also stated that vaccinating 1.3 billion people is not a “trivial task”, and added that the development of a Cowin-like platform shows India can develop such great scalable digital systems.
“People talked of digital divide in getting vaccine but from the beginning itself we ensured that it is very easy to get on the platform and schedule, reschedule or cancel an appointment and at the same time if that is not possible then you can call a centre and get it done and go to common service centres to get an appointment,” he said.
“Most importantly you can go without any appointment to the vaccination centre and get vaccinated. In fact, 80 percent of our people have gone to the centre without any appointment,” he added.
On the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), Sharma said the whole idea is based on the concept that many services can be digitally delivered. The NDHM will house all kinds of databases which will have a facility for the patient to fetch his/her records, he said.
