Centre launches competition for strengthening COVID-19 vaccine digital network

The Centre on Wednesday launched a technology competition which invites solutions from IT firms and start-ups to help strengthen the government's digital platform CoWIN. CoWIN is a digital platform developed by the Centre for rolling out and scaling up COVID-19 vaccine distribution in the country.

For CoWIN, the government is furthering the use of Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN) system. The eVIN system provides real-time information on the available COVID-19 vaccine stocks and also the storage temperatures across all cold storage points in the country.

The competition is a collaboration between the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Ministry of Electronics and IT, a government statement read.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is in search of technical solutions which can solve problems related to portability, transportation of the COVID-19 vaccines. They also want to address issues of queue management, reporting and monitoring mechanism for dealing with any adverse situation following the administration of the vaccine.

IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in the statement, "India's innovators have played a crucial role in our fight against COVID-19. I invite innovators and start-ups for a grand challenge to strengthen CoWIN platform for rollout of COVID-19 vaccination program across India."

The applicants who emerge as the top 5 will be provided with CoWIN Application Programming Interface (APIs) to showcase the efficacy of the solutions they have suggested and for later possible integration with the CoWIN platform. Apart from this, each shortlisted applicant has a chance to win Rs 2 lakh for covering up their logistical requirements.

The top 2 contestants will be awarded Rs 40 lakh and Rs 20 lakh respectively after the successful migration of their developed solutions onto the digital cloud on which the CoWIN platform is hosted, according to a government statement.

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