Technical glitches mark vaccination drive across Thane district

The Thane Municipal Corporation and Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation authorities had to individually call all the beneficiaries on Friday night to inform about the vaccination process and allot time slots accordingly due to the issues faced by the CoWIN portal

Though the entire vaccination drive in Mumbai Metropolitan Region was conducted smoothly, it was not without a few technical glitches. Most municipal corporations had to conduct the drive manually as the server was down.

TMC health workers show victory sign on Day 1 of vaccination at Ghodbunder Road civic hospital in Thane. (Praful Gangurde/HT photo)

Thane district had to temporarily suspend the vaccination process for more than an hour on Saturday.

Kailas Pawar, civil health surgeon, Thane district, said, “Despite the delay at the start, we managed to complete vaccination of all the 100 beneficiaries by 4.30pm. As the CoWIN portal was overloaded, we had to resort to manually feeding the data of all the beneficiaries. However, we managed to successfully complete the first day of vaccination with no major hurdles.”

Pawar was the first to get vaccinated at the civil hospital followed by which there was a delay of around one-and-a-half hours.

“We arrived at around 10.45am at the hospital for the vaccination but had to wait till 1pm to get vaccinated due to the technical glitch. However, the vaccination was a pain-free process and it was executed smoothly,” said Dr Jinal Rokade, dental surgeon.

Glitches were seen in three centres of Kalyan-Dombivli, where the drive was conducted manually from 10.50am.

“There was a guideline from the state on Friday that if the online system doesn’t work, vaccination should be carried out on time and the details of the beneficiaries shall be recorded manually. We followed the same. We will update the data on the server later,” said Dr Pratibha Panpatil, epidemic officer, KDMC.

Meanwhile, a major delay was observed in Navi Mumbai as the vaccination drive at its four centres began only at around 1pm due to technical error. The entire process was finally carried out offline.