India’s CoWIN platform, through which 1.38 billion Indians are being vaccinated against Covid-19, will be made open source. The announcement was made by National Health Authority CEO RS Sharma.
“CoWIN has become popular,” he wrote on Twitter. “Over 50 countries from across Central Asia, Latin America & Africa, are interested in this technology,” he added.
“We are telling the world how this system can work and how we are ready to share an open-source software with any country free of cost. There have been huge interests starting from Canada, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Nigeria, Uganda,” Sharma said.
He further added Prime Minister Narendra Modi had directed the IT responders of India to create an open-source version of CoWIN free of cost to any interested country.
Sharma also said that vaccinating 1.3 billion people is not a “trivial task”, and added that the development of CoWIN-like platform shows India has the capability to develop such great scalable digital systems.
“People talked of the digital divide in getting the vaccine but from the beginning itself we ensured that it is very easy to get on the platform and schedule, reschedule or cancel an appointment and at the same time if that is not possible then you can call a centre and get it done and go to common service centres to get an appointment,” he said.
On June 26, the central government allowed the users to link their Covid-19 vaccination certificate to passports on the CoWIN portal. This decision came as a big relief to all the people who were planning to travel abroad.
