India Promises the World to provide Co-Win App

Promising the world that India would make Co-WIN App available to any and all countries, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that technology platform for COVID Vaccination s being prepared to be made open source and soon it will be available to any and all countries. Opening the Co-WIN Global Conclave the Prime Minister said that Today's Conclave is the first step to introduce this platform to the world. 

 

Modi said that technology is integral to the fight against COVID-19 and with nearly 200 million users, this 'Aarogya Setu' app is a readily available package for developers. Having been used in India, it has been tested in the real world for speed and scale.

Co-WIN is the crown jewel of our Digital India initiative and this platform shall go down in history for facilitating inoculation of a large percentage of the world’s population with ease, while ensuring complete transparency, said Union Health Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare addressed the inaugural session of Co-WIN Global Conclave through Video Conference,  

Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare addressed the inaugural session of Co-WIN Global Conclave through Video Conference. The conclave was attended by dignitaries from 142 countries including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Guyana, Antigua & Barbuda, St. Kitts & Nevis and Zambia amongst several others. The conclave was jointly organized by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and National Health Authority (NHA) with an objective to extend the Co-WIN platform as a digital public good to the world. CoWIN has guided India’s Public Health response to confront, combat and control the pandemic in a systematic and sustained manner. The robust, inclusive and scalable system can prevent rent-seeking, black marketing and other malpractices.

“I must say my government is more than glad to share with our extended global family the path-breaking, next-gen digital platform ‘Co-WIN’ which has been indigenously developed in India and is powering the rapid progress of one of the world’s largest vaccination drives against COVID-19,” said Dr Harsh Vardhan. 

 COVID-19 has infected millions of people and has had a devastating impact on the livelihood of many more.

With the aid of technology, India has been able to execute large-scale surveillance to effectively implement our ‘test, track & treat’ strategy helping us attain one of the lowest fatality rates in the world.

“Our scientists worked at lightning speed to provide us with 2 vaccines against COVID19 in record time which helped us kick- start our Vaccination Drive in mid-January. As remarkable as this achievement has been, it was not the only challenge in front of us. With a country of more than 1.3 billion people, we faced a mammoth challenge of ensuring fair and equitable distribution of the vaccines as well as their last mile delivery,” the Health Minister said. 

For a successful vaccination programme the country needed the active participation of the entire health infrastructure across the public and private sector. Further, India  also needed to develop a robust system that can prevent rent-seeking, black-marketing and other mal-practices which if not checked can thwart a mass vaccination drive.

Taking cognizance of these challenges, empowered groups of domain experts were quickly constituted to meticulously plan and subsequently execute the vaccination drive.

“The backbone of this drive had to be a comprehensive platform which would ensure equitable coverage across all our States and Union Territories ensure inclusive distribution of vaccines using data to remove information asymmetry and align stakeholders. And continuous tracking of Adverse Events Following Immunization to not only respond to help such citizens to overcome Adverse Events but also generate data for policy making,” Dr Harsh Vardhan remarked. 

With the agenda in place, experts from my Ministry of Health and those from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology came together to co-create this Co-WIN platform in coordination with various other stakeholders, giving birth to the robust IT system for planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of COVID-19 vaccination in India.

According to Dr Harsh Vardhan, the need of the hour is to speed up the pace of vaccinating people across the world. For this, we are excited to offer the Co-WIN platform as a technology tool that can be used for greater public good around the world. I hope all your countries are able to gain value and benefit from our offering.