Maharashtra: Vaccination drive suspended till Monday after glitch in Co-WIN app

Medical staffs at a vaccination centre in Mumbai | Representational Image | Credit: Satej Shinde

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation issued a statement on Saturday night announcing that it will be suspending the Covid-19 vaccination drive for two days owing to glitches in the cloud-based CoWIN app being used to manage the programme.

The glitches in the app slowed down the process on Day 1. While digital registration is mandatory, on the first day the government had allowed offline registration. However, it cannot be continued further as the app needs to be fixed, a senior official said.

The civic body said in the statement that the drive was being postponed by two days so that technical glitches in the app can be fixed.

Later, Maharashtra Health Minister Rajesh Tope told the media that there were technical issues not just in Maharashtra but everywhere else in the country. "Not just in Maharashtra, this issues was faced everywhere in the country during the execution of vaccination drive. We have decided to suspend the vaccination for the next two days. We had alerted the Centre, specifically pointing out and listing problems with the CoWIN app but despite assurances by Union Minister Harsh Vardhan, there were no improvements," Tope told media.

Healthcare workers at the frontline of India's COVID-19 battle got their first jabs on Saturday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi launching the world's largest vaccination drive against the pandemic, showing the light at the end of a 10-month tunnel that upended millions of lives and livelihoods.

Addressing the nation ahead of the launch, PM Modi reminded people that two doses of the vaccine are very important and asked them to continue with masks and social distancing even after receiving the jabs.