NEW DELHI, June 11: As India’s huge population finding it tough to book online vaccination for the people above 18 years of age, Paytm, Infosys and MakeMyTrip companies are seeking approval from the government to provide online vaccine bookings.
The government relaxed rules last month to potentially allow third-party apps to offer vaccine bookings and has taken back control of procurement from states following delays and shortages. It also faced initial problems with its own vaccine booking platform.
Around 15 state agencies and private companies, which also include Indian healthcare giants Apollo and Max, and online pharmacy 1mg, have asked to be allowed to offer vaccine bookings, R.S. Sharma, head of the government’s panel managing the CoWIN vaccination registration platform, said.
Softbank-backed digital payments app Paytm has more than 100 million monthly active users and MakeMyTrip has 12 million. Their popularity is seen providing more options to Indians looking to book their COVID-19 shots, particularly if they are struggling with an unfamiliar government platform.
“It will work in favour of the country, the union of all the entities is better than just one individual platform,” Sharma said.
MakeMyTrip CEO Rajesh Magow said the company wanted to help people book their vaccination slots. 1mg said it was waiting for government approvals. Only 3.5% of India’s 1.3 billion population has been fully immunised against COVID-19 and health officials say the pace would have to be ramped up to avoid further deadly surges of the virus, like the one that swept the country recently..
While much will depend on pick up in scarce vaccine supplies, experts say more booking options should help. Several software developers have already been using publicly available coding for the CoWIN platform to create tools that send Telegram alerts to help people book slots.
“Right now, even if you find a slot using alerts, you have to still go to the government website and follow many steps. Companies will be able to give a better user experience compared to CoWIN,” said Berty Thomas, a software developer who had designed Telegram alerts for notifying people about slots.
Paytm too has enabled a notification feature on its app.
Sharma praised the CoWIN platform saying at least three African nations – Zambia, Nigeria and Malawi – had enquired about using it for their own vaccination drives.
“We will give them the portal free of cost and they can customize. This is highly scalable,” said Sharma.
(Manas Dasgupta)
