Co-WIN vaccination platform in demand, over 50 countries show interest in open source

About 50 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Panama, have shown interest in having a Co-WIN like system to run their vaccination drive, a senior official said Monday, adding India is ready to share the open source software free of cost.

Dr R S Sharma, the chairman of the empowered group for Covid-19 vaccine administration, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed officials to create an open source version of the platform and give it free of cost to any country that wants it.

"The Cowin platform has become so popular that as many as 50 countries from central Asia, Latin America, Africa all showed interest in having a Co-win like system," Sharma said at the second Public Health Summit 2021 on "Emerging Imperatives in Strengthening Public Health for India" organised by Confederation of Indian Industry.

Sources said other countries such as Vietnam, Iraq, Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates have also expressed interest in knowing about the Co-WIN platform for implementing it in their own countries to run their own Covid programmes.

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.