- Cowin platform has become so popular that as many as 50 countries from central Asia, Latin America, Africa all showed interest in having a Co-win like system
- Sources said other countries such as Vietnam, Iraq, Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates have also expressed interest in knowing about the Co-WIN platform for implementing it in their own countries
About 50 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Panama, have shown interest in having a Co-WIN like system to run their vaccination drive, a senior official said Monday, adding India is ready to share the open source software free of cost. Dr R S Sharma, the chairman of the empowered group for Covid-19 vaccine administration, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed officials to create an open source version of the platform and give it free of cost to any country that wants it.
Sharma said at the second Public Health Summit 2021 that the Cowin platform has become so popular that as many as 50 countries from central Asia, Latin America, Africa all showed interest in having a Co-win like system. He added that India is telling the world how this system can work and how It 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.
Co-WIN has grown to handling 30 crore plus registrations and vaccinations
Sources said other countries such as Vietnam, Iraq, Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates have also expressed interest in knowing about the Co-WIN platform for implementing it in their own countries to run their own Covid programmes. In five months, Sharma said, Co-WIN has grown to handling 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 added. Sharma also said that vaccinating 1.3 billion people is not a “trivial task”, and added that the development of Cowin-like platform shows India has the capability to develop such great scalable digital systems.
He added that people talked of digital divide in getting vaccine but from the beginning itself government 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. Most importantly one can go without any appointment to vaccination centre and get vaccinated. In fact, 80 per cent of our people have gone to the centre without any appointment.
