India is celebrating a remarkable achievement, with over 80 percent of its adult population having received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The scale of this achievement is staggering. In just over one year, India has administered over 1.7 billion doses of vaccines — that is over 720 million people fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
India's million-plus health workers have been at the forefront of this national effort — the largest vaccination drive in the world.
India has made important contributions to international cooperation in fighting COVID-19, especially through donating vaccines to peacekeeping operations and nearly 100 countries in need through the COVAX platform.
The United Nations in India is a proud partner of the Government of India in its fight against COVID-19 — supporting frontline workers, strengthening systems, delivering essential equipment and medical supplies, working with communities, securing livelihoods, countering misinformation, fighting the COVID surge— and ensuring that life-saving vaccinations were delivered at speed and scale.
Through this photo story, we present to you some highlights of our work supporting India's vaccination drive.
Winning over COVID - CoWIN
The CoWIN (Winning Over Covid-19) digital platform developed by the Government of India is the cornerstone of its successful vaccination drive. The application allows for the tracking of vaccines, as well as appointment registration and issuing vaccination certificates. UNDP has been providing technical and implementation support to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for roll-out of the CoWIN platform across the country.
Starting from 2015, UNDP has been training vaccine and cold chain handlers to use the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network, or eVIN — a digital technology introduced by the Government of India to digitize vaccine stocks and monitor temperature of the cold chain. A cadre of more than 50,000 public health workers were already using digital technology to carry out vaccine-related transactions at all the public health facilities in the country - giving an invaluable boost for deploying CoWIN.
The digital enabler for India’s COVID-19 vaccination drive, CoWIN helps programme managers and vaccinators to create and manage sessions, develop reports and monitor progress. UNDP has trained and is providing guidance and support to over 1.2 million frontline workers engaged in the COVID vaccination drive including health workers, government staff, medical officers and others.
The World Health Organisation organised training sessions on safe vaccinations for 370,000 vaccinators. Nearly 400,000 vaccination team members were also trained using CoWIN for name-based reporting of vaccination.
Cold Chain Management
Delivering vaccines requires a chain of precisely coordinated events in temperature-controlled environments to store, manage and transport these life-saving products from the factories they were produced in. This is called a cold chain. Upgrading cold chain systems was critical in strengthening India's capacity to deliver COVID-19 vaccines as well as for strengthing immunization service delivery in the long term.
UNICEF supplied cold chain equipment with support from Germany as part of cold chain strengthening. To support the COVID-19 vaccination drive as well as routine vaccination for children in the long-term, UNICEF procured and supplied 238,272 pieces of cold chain equipment to India, benefiting 310 million people.
A key component of UNDP’s cold chain support is helping in the implementation of the eVIN app, which enables real-time information on cold chain temperature and vaccine stocks and flows at all points of the cold chain, from the initial dispatch of vaccines to the last point, from where they are administered.
eVIN is also tracking COVID19 vaccine supplies across the country.
Supporting Frontline Workers
India’s frontline health workers are the heroes in the battle against COVID-19, facing unprecedented workloads and personal risk in conditions requiring high human interaction to ensure that essential health and social protection schemes continued through the pandemic.
This includes millions of volunteers, who worked tirelessly across the country to increase awareness and amplifying messages on COVID-appropriate behaviours, treatments and boosting vaccine confidence.
UN Agencies supported India's frontline workers - procuring millions of pieces of PPE that helped keep them safe, training them in Infection Prevention and Control and risk communications on COVID-19 mitigation to help them keep their communities safe.
Leaving No one Behind
Ending the pandemic and saving lives depends on everyone everywhere receiving vaccines, including the most marginalized groups, refugees and remote populations. Demonstrating equity and inclusiveness, India included refugees and asylum-seekers in its national vaccination programme.