Registration for vaccine opens on CoWIN for third phase drive

New Delhi: Nearly 1.33 crore people are said to have registered on CoWIN to receive vaccine jab as the country is set to begin the third phase of the COVID vaccine drive on May 1.

Over 80 lakh registrations were reported to have made within 3 hours after the government's dedicated website for vaccine registration opened on Wednesday.

In the third phase of the vaccination drive, everyone above the age of 18 will be eligible to get inoculated against Covid-19.

The Union Health Ministry highlighted that vaccination is a critical component of the containment and management strategy of the Government of India in its fight against the Covid pandemic.

"A liberalised and accelerated Phase 3 strategy of Covid-19 vaccination will be implemented from May 1. Registration for the newly eligible population groups commenced today from 4 pm. Potential beneficiaries can register directly on the Co-WIN portal (cowin.gov.in) or through the Aarogya Setu app," the ministry said.

The government claimed that the Co-WIN software is a robust, dependable and agile technology and it offers anytime anywhere registration for Covid-19 vaccination.

"The capacity of the servers and other parameters have been ramped up to match the unprecedented scale of immunisation so that the Co-WIN system can provide citizen-centric services. Inclusivity, speed and scalability have been kept in mind while designing the unique digital platform with all components being portable and synchronous without excessive and unnecessary dependencies," the ministry said.

The Ministry also denied reports suggesting that the Co-WIN platform was unresponsive/overshooting the server capacity and was not able to respond to the unprecedented number of registrations taking place.

"It is clarified that the media reports that the server has crashed are incorrect and are without any basis. The server supporting the Co-WIN digital portal continues to work smoothly at its highest efficiency," it said.

People registering on the platform are mostly the age group of 18 to 44 years.

"The statistics indicate that far from crashing or performing slowly, the system is performing without any glitches. It is recording 55,000 hits per second and is completely stable," the government said.

Meanwhile many states are already complaining of vaccine shortages with the third phase of vaccination for the larger population kicking in two days from now.

These states have already alerted the Centre about their vaccine requirement.

(with inputs from IANS)