Covid-19 vaccination drive moves at a slow pace in populous states

According to the health ministry, 2.5 % of India’s people have got both doses of vaccination while 9.3% have got a single jab as of May 16, 121 days after the drive started on January 16.

Updated on: May 17, 2021, 01:14:06 IST

By Chetan Chauhan, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

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Less than 2% of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand’s population -- the states account for one-third of the country’s people -- has been fully vaccinated, even as several smaller states such as Tripura, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh have done much better, health ministry data shows.

A health worker inoculates a man with a dose of Sinopharm vaccine against the Covid-19 coronavirus at a vaccination centre in Rawalpindi. (AFP)

According to the health ministry, 2.5 % of India’s people have got both doses of vaccination while 9.3% have got a single jab as of May 16, 121 days after the drive started on January 16.

Till May 16, the health ministry’s data showed, 98.8 million people have got a single dose and 41.7 million both doses of the Covid vaccine.

“This data shows the enormous task ahead for us is to completely vaccinate 97% of the remaining population. We still need 2.4 billion doses to vaccinate the unvaccinated,” said Jamesh Wilson, a Kerala-based independent researcher, who juxtaposed the vaccination data with projected population figures for states for the year 2021.

Also Read | Covid-19 vaccine: How Centre is scaling up Covaxin production

Several state governments had slowed down vaccination since the last week of April due to short supply of vaccines from the two Indian manufacturers – Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech – and as many as 12 states have or are in the process of floating global tenders for vaccines. However, officials in most states don’t expect to get vaccines from international manufacturers in the next three to four months.

Some states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka and Rajasthan had to suspend vaccination of the 18-44 age group as enough vaccine were not available. States such as Punjab and Andhra Pradesh want the Centre to procure all vaccines and distribute them to the state rather than individual states trying to buying them from vaccine manufacturers in India and abroad.

Niti Aayog member health VK Paul on Sunday told news agency PTI that the government plans to ramp up Covaxin’s per month production from the present 15 million doses to 100 million. The ministry of science and technology had earlier said Bharat Biotech will start manufacturing 10 crore doses per month by September. “Financial support is being provided as grant from GoI to the tune of approx ₹65 crore to Bharat Biotech’s new Bangalore facility which is being repurposed to increase the capacity of vaccine production,” the ministry said in a statement on Friday.

The health ministry’s data showed that the progress of vaccination was abysmally low in Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh, which account for 32.2% of India’s population. These states combined have so far vaccinated only 1.51% of their population with both doses. Only 5.91% people in these states have been vaccinated with a single dose.

Another five states --- Jharkhand, Punjab, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Telangana --- having 16% of the country’s population of India having given both doses to 2.32% of population and a single dose to 8.4% of population. “If we take the above mentioned 8 states together, they represent 48.2% of India’s population and only 1.78% of their population has got both doses. Less than 10% of the population has got a single dose,” Wilson said.

Smaller population states such as Ladakh and Tripura have vaccinated more than 12% of their population with both doses and 29.05% and 23.13% of their population, respectively, with a single dose. Sikkim and Lakshadweep vaccinated 8.8% and 9.54% of their population, respectively, with both doses, the data shows.

HT reported on Sunday that most of the vaccination in India has taken place in urban areas with large swathes of the hinterland yet to be brought under coverage. As per data on the Co-WIN app, doses administered in urban areas were 1.7 times of those in villages, where around 60% of the country’s population lives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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