Glitches in Co-Win app in U’khand, allege health dept workers

Dehradun

: Health department workers in Uttarakhand are pointing out what they claim are technical

glitches

in the Centre’s Co-Win app.

The health workers said that in several cases, the app is not sending registration messages to the beneficiaries while in others, the details of the beneficiaries are incorrect. Till now, the state has managed to achieve 78% inoculation targets for healthcare workers while 65% of frontline workers have been vaccinated so far against the target.

Vinay Negi (name changed), staffer at Government Doon Medical College (GDMC) in Dehradun was told that he will get the first dose of Covid-19 vaccination in the initial few days of the inoculation drive that started countrywide on January 16.

To his surprise, his name didn’t appear in the beneficiary details for more than a fortnight. He later volunteered himself and got the shot after manual registration. In case of second dose of the vaccine, Negi again didn’t receive any SMS alert.

“This is happening with many beneficiaries. In some cases, their details on the app are wrong and hence it is becoming difficult to contact them. In other cases, the SMS that goes to the beneficiary wasn’t received by him and hence he didn’t turn up to the camp. We have to manually keep track of the turns and inform the people personally,” said Dr NS Khatri, deputy medical superintendent at GDMC.

Rohit Verma, a contractual staffer at GDMC, added that complaints of incorrect data are coming more frequently in the case of frontline workers. “The difficulty is that it takes a lot of time to contact their departments and then take their contacts and rectify them as the Co-Win app only opens when the combination of your registration, DOB and other details matches,” he added.

Dr Saroj Naithani, director of National Health Mission (NHM) who is heading the Covid-19 vaccination drive in Uttarakhand said that the issue of missing names from the Co-Win app was fixed since government allowed walk-in and voluntary vaccination but technical glitches like wrong details and SMS delays are still being reported in large numbers.

“We are able to handle this as of now since just healthcare and frontline workers are being vaccinated presently. We mostly know them or know people who know about their details. But during public immunisation, there will be a problem in tracking beneficiaries,” she added.