CoWIN to go global as countries interested in adopting the tech: Dr RS Sharma

About 50 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Panama, have shown interest in having a CoWIN-like system to run their vaccination drive, reported PTI. It added that 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.

"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 CoWIN-like system," Sharma said at the second Public Health Summit 2021 on 'Emerging Imperatives in Strengthening Public Health for India' organised by Confederation of Indian Industry.

"We are telling the world how this system can work and how we 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," he said. Other countries such as Vietnam, Iraq, Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates have also expressed interest in knowing about the CoWIN platform for implementing it in their own countries to run their own Covid programmes.

#CoWIN has become popular! Over 50 countries from across Central Asia, Latin America & Africa, are interested in this #technology. @PMOIndia has directed us to create an open-source version of #CoWIN free of cost to any interested country. #DigitalIndia #DigitalTransformation

— RS Sharma (@rssharma3) June 28, 2021

A virtual event on July 5 to share how the tech works, said DR RS Sharma.

He also said a virtual global conclave of health and technology experts from across the world will be held on July 5 where India will share how this system works.

In five months, Sharma said, CoWIN has grown to handle 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 said. 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.

"People talked of the digital divide in getting the vaccine but from the beginning itself we 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," he said. "Most importantly you 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 an appointment," he added.