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Health | A Himalayan District With Scant Internet Works Around CoWIN App To Vaccinate People -Srishti Jaswal

A Himalayan District With Scant Internet Works Around CoWIN App To Vaccinate People -Srishti Jaswal

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published Published on Jul 12, 2021   modified Modified on Jul 13, 2021

-Article-14.com

After tourists grabbed 50% of Covid-19 vaccine slots in Lahaul and Spiti, a region with little Internet connectivity, district officials used Google forms, WhatsApp and paper to book appointments. With no more than 5.1% of Indians fully vaccinated, this approach could help 200 million Indians in rural, remote areas—if vaccines are available.

Lahaul & Spiti (Himachal Pradesh): Among those vaccinated when vaccines were made available in this remote Himalayan district was David Raj, 36, a German, who lived in a rented cottage in the tourist town of Manali. 

Raj travelled 45 km northeast to Lahaul and Spiti where he was vaccinated in what he described as a “very comfortable” experience. It was an experience that his landlady, Santosh Kumari, 55, did not share.

When she travelled to Manali from her village of Jalma, which has no Internet connectivity or mobile signal, to get vaccinations for her children, aged 19 and 24, she could not get an appointment. 

That required mandatory registration for those aged 18 to 45 on the Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWIN) portal application, which is difficult in Lahaul and Spiti, a remote district in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, where more than half of its 30,000 people are electronically cut off from the rest of the world. 

The district lies more than 300 km to the north of state capital, Shimla, and no network provides a signal at an altitude of over 10,000 ft. Yet, when the local administration opened online booking for the first Covid-19 vaccination drive on 17 May 2021 through CoWIN, all the slots were booked within minutes. 

On 17 May, over 50% of the jabs were taken by those situated on the luminous side of the digital divide, instead of the natives. Most of them were tourists from far off states such as Rajasthan, Punjab, Delhi and Maharashtra. One, Raj, was from Germany. 

“There were only 100 slots available,” said Pankaj Rai, district commissioner of Lahaul and Spiti. “Out of those, around 60 were taken by people outside the district.”

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Article-14.com, 12 July, 2021, https://article-14.com/post/a-himalayan-district-with-scant-internet-works-around-cowin-app-to-vaccinate-people-60e95a3309f5b


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