In a bid to straighten states up, the Government of India has made it abundantly clear in its new vaccination guidelines that vaccine wastage rates will play a tremendous role in states being allocated with vaccine doses. It must be remembered that Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday announced the re-centralisation of vaccine procurement and distribution after his government witnessed states making a complete mess out of India’s vaccination campaign in the past month. Now that vaccine allocation to states will be negatively affected by their respective vaccine wastage rates, opposition ruled states are expected to get their act together soon.
“Vaccine doses provided free of cost by Government of India will be allocated to States/UTs based on criteria such as population, disease burden and the progress of vaccination. Wastage of vaccine will affect the allocation negatively,” the new guidelines say. For so long, the states were taking their vaccine wastage very casually – not realising that every dose wasted might be a potential death knell for one Indian citizen.
The Central government realises the same, and by deciding to not allocate vaccines to such states rather richly, has forced their governments to immediately address vaccine wastage rates in their territories. According to data released in late May by the Union Health Ministry, states like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu are topping the list of vaccine wastage with astronomically high numbers. Incidentally, all these states are opposition-ruled.
Jharkhand has recorded wastage as high as 37.3 per cent while Chhattisgarh came second with 30.2 per cent and Tamil Nadu reported 15.5 per cent wastage. It is imperative to note that the national average of doses being wasted is only 6.3 per cent. TFI had last month reported how Rajasthan was among the frontrunners when it comes to wasting vaccine doses. Under the Congress regime of Rajasthan, a total of 11.5 lakh – amounting to 7 per cent of total vaccine doses have been wasted.
The numbers coming in from Rajasthan’s districts are startling, to say the least, with the district of Churu reporting the highest loss of vaccine at 39.7 per cent. Churu is followed by Hanumagarh with 24.60 per cent, Bharatpur at 17.13 per cent and Kota at 16.71 per cent vaccine wastage.
The states have been brazenly rejecting the data of vaccine wastage, and claiming that the figures of vaccine wastage are actually below the national average. “We have already taken this up. There is a data mismatch. There is vaccine usage data they haven’t taken into account. This was also taken up in the meeting with health minister Harsh Vardhan Ji and we were assured that till data is tallied it would not be released,” Chhattisgarh health minister T S Singh Deo told ET.
Meanwhile, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren has disputed the data saying correct vaccination data could not be uploaded on the CoWin site because of glitches. “As per total vaccine doses availability with Govt on Jharkhand till today, the current Vaccine Wastage proportion is only 4.65%. Vaccination data could not be fully updated to the central Co-Win Server/ Platform due to technical difficulties/glitches & the updation is in process,” tweeted Hemant Soren.
The Modi government’s policy of allocating maximum vaccines to states where the wastage rates are low will now act as an incentive for all state governments to be disciplined and ensure that their wastage rates are below the national average.
