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Coronavirus pandemic
This Week in AsiaHealth & Environment

India’s digital divide is hampering its mass Covid-19 vaccination campaign

  • Millions of Indians do not have access to the internet or a smartphone, yet vaccine registration can only be done online through a government portal
  • Other challenges include vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, people lacking identification documents, and the status of refugees such as Rohingya

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Homeless people in New Delhi queue up at a shelter where officials help them to register for the country’s vaccination programme. Photo: AFP
Minaam Shah
Squeezed between a busy hotel district and the New Delhi Railway station, Paharganj slums in India’s capital barely reflects a city that was a Covid-19 hotspot just weeks ago. Trash vendors wander through the settlements, children play barefoot in the streets and people socialise until late at night. All without wearing face masks.

This is pretty recent, however. In May, when New Delhi was recording over 25,000 cases and 500 deaths nearly every day, the shanties in Paharganj made sure the virus was kept out.

Jeevan Kumar, a 46 year-old labourer from the state of Bihar, was among those on guard. “We worked in shifts and patrolled the area so that no outsider could creep inside the slum with the virus. Little children would roam around the shanties asking everyone to mask up. With these efforts, we saved our slum from a major disaster.”

As Covid-19 cases have started to drop across India, so have the precautionary measures. On Thursday, the country recorded 41,806 new cases, significantly down from about 400,000 daily cases at the height of the second wave.

“People have lost their patience now and are venturing out without masks. If there is a time to vaccinate slums and other such potential hotspots, it is now,” Kumar told This Week in Asia.

But in the Paharganj slums, residents do not know anyone who has had a jab.

When the world’s biggest vaccination drive was launched, health secretary Rajesh Bhusan promised that “every Indian who needs to be vaccinated will be vaccinated”, aiming to administer jabs to most of the adult population by the end of the year.
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