COVID-19: India's current vaccination rate 'not good enough', says Arvind Panagariya

Economist and former vice chairman of NITI Aayog Arvind Panagariya has raised questions on India's current vaccination rate against COVID-19, and said the current pace of 30-40 lakh doses per day is "not good enough".

In a tweet, Panagariya said India needs to increase the pace of vaccination to administer 50-60 lakh doses per day.

He also wondered if the slow pace of vaccination was because of insufficient production of vaccines or due to vaccine hesitancy.

As per the Union Health Ministry, India had adminstered 37.60 crore doses of COVID-19 vaccine doses as of Sunday morning.

From June 21, the new phase of universalisation of COVID-19 vaccination commenced. Under this, the Centre is providing COVID-19 vaccines for free to everyone above the age of 18 years. While vaccination pace had picked up initially after the commencement of new vaccination phase, it has since tapered off.

India administered a record 91.74 lakh vaccine doses on June 21, while the average per day vaccination in June 21-27 week was at 61.14 lakh. However, daily vaccinations stood at about 38.78 lakh doses per day during the seven day period of July 3-9, data from vaccine platform CoWIN showed.

Serum Institute of India's Covishield and Bharat Biotech's Covaxin vaccines were granted emergency use approval in January and are being widely used in the country's vaccination programme. Besides, Russian vaccine Sputnik V was also granted approval in April, while Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine got approval last month.

India reported 41,506 new COVID-19 cases in the previous 24 hours as of Sunday morning, while the active case load stood at 4,54,118.