As the government prepares to vaccinate senior citizens and persons with comorbidities, Forbes India deconstructs the immunisation plan and looks at how private sector involvement can speed up the current laggard pace of Covid-19 vaccinations
A frontline health worker gets vaccinated against Covid-19 at sector 30 district hospital, on February 19, 2021 in Noida, India.
Image: Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
The world’s largest vaccination drive is currently underway in India.
From March 1, the programme will be extended to the country’s private hospitals for the first time under the next phase of immunisation for senior citizens and persons with comorbidities. For a few months now, the entire vaccination rollout in the country has been reminiscent of the country’s once notorious government-controlled economy, where the government has been undertaking the initiative, keeping the private sector at bay.
That’s also probably why the pace of vaccination has been laggard, forcing clarion calls from India’s top business leaders to allow participation. “If the government was to engage private industry quickly, we can rest assured that we can achieve a coverage of 500 million people within 60 days,” Azim Premji, the chairman of Wipro, told India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in a post budget interaction. “That's a practicality. It is important that the government consider this as a major supplementation to the effort.”
This week, the government finally provided some reprieve and permitted private hospitals in the country to start vaccinating large swathes of the population. Ever since the vaccination began on January 16, it has only been the government that has purchased the vaccines and even administered them to close to 3 crore health care and frontline workers.