How 2 popular online applications have impacted India’s Vaccination Drive?

The Covid-19 pandemic is not over yet. The diverse land of India was in the midst of a health crisis, in April and May 2021. The health sector has completely been discredited and the federal government is still unable to get the situation under control. From April 5, 2021, the number of positive cases stayed above 100K, peaking at 414K on May 6 2021 with a steep increase in deaths to COVID-19, which rose to 4.5K on May 18 2021.

With a large vaccination drive, it was necessary to keep everyone on the safe side through proper dissemination of information; the government of India launched an open-sourced app named Arogya Setu on 2 April 2020, as soon as the lockdown started in the country. Within 40 days, the app reached more than 100M downloads. After the country was unlocked in July and August, the app was made mandatory for travellers and the covid patients.

In January 2021, the government launched another application CoWin (Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network) for vaccination drive registration and booking slots.

Certain claims and concerns regarding this application were put across by the citizens and some of them got highlighted with the recent surge in the second wave of virus infection.

Access to the internet and devices doesn’t show a very luminous picture in the country. The number of internet users is currently 624M with 572.2M active users. With 50% internet penetration in 2020, any online solution poses a challenge and exclusion to nearly half of the population which is more than 600M. Rural and suburban regions face more challenges, including long power shortages, lack of healthcare facilities, and misinformation regarding covid infection.

When vaccinations for adults aged 18-44 started in May 2021, pre-registered appointees were only allowed to get vaccinated. People had to apply through CoWin portals, and the walk-in vaccination programme was not allowed. Even in the case of states where vaccines were freely available, like Delhi; walk-in vaccinations couldn’t be initiated. This left huge sections of people like daily wage earners, homeless or slum dwellers out of vaccine centres. Data reflects that there was a rapid increase in the speed of vaccination immediately after walk-in vaccinations were allowed from May 25 2021.

Vaccination statistics from Jan 16, 2021 to July 30, 2021.

Like any other governmental website, the Co-win portal also had technical glitches. Most of the users regard the slot-booking as “fastest-finger firsts”. People reported having been trying to book slots for more than 15 days. Some even report booking a slot but the unavailability of enough vaccines at centres, on the allotted day, resulted in the effort is futile, in May 2021. Many technical glitches were reported in the initial phase of the first wave, for senior citizens and reports of app crashes also surfaced, creating discontent.

Aarogya Setu app, launched as a contact tracing app raised privacy concerns and was also regarded as an application, the government can use for “surveillance”. Various regulations made Aarogya Setu compulsory for different occasions like travelling, government employees, food delivery persons, and many others.

The application is required to have Bluetooth and GPS be switched on all time and it takes admin access for the Bluetooth settings. Admin access on devices poses a security threat as the application can take more data than required. In 2018-19, the Economic Survey of India mentioned that data by citizens should be treated as a public good and some parts should be monetised by giving access to private companies to ease the pressure on government finances.

The government changed the privacy policy of the app thrice. It specifies a data retention period of 180 days for personal data which is held and third parties will have to comply with these rules.

During the recent surge of cases in April, the Aarogya Setu app failed to deliver, due to multiple reasons. It depends on the voluntary information fed by the users. People have reported that the app fails to report the Covid-19 positive cases near them, which they are aware of; making the data unreliable and inefficient. The major concern which lies here is that people, who believe in this information, may step out assuming the area is safe, underestimating the number of positive cases. Ultimately it leads to an increase in cases, as the updating of information takes more time.

Mandatory use of the Aarogya Setu and Co-Win app also have been proved ineffective due to lack of digital literacy among the public. This move is seen as exclusionary and can also lead to crowds in Common service Centres (Cyber Cafes) in rural and suburban areas.

Aarogya Setu and Co-Win applications, which were designed to eliminate the disinformation and fake news in the public, seemed to add among the citizens and caused panic and distrust. And as we can see from the official statistics, Covid-19 cases increased increasingly, while the rate of vaccination remained low. Government should rely on measures (other than tech solutions) to increase its reach and boost up the largest vaccination drive.