Vaccine registration: ‘Incentives’ to village entrepreneurs can boost turnout at CSCs

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Common Service Centres (CSCs), pegged as a vital cog to augment rural vaccination numbers via the CoWIN platform, are yet to catch up on the registrations being done through them compared to the overall vaccine beneficiaries registered on the platform, as per the latest data accessed by The Indian Express.

As of July 6, CSCs registered about 16.77 lakh people living in rural areas for vaccinations on CoWIN, compared to the overall registrations 36.89 crore. This is only marginally higher compared to the registrations done by the CSCs as of June 12. According to records obtained by The Indian Express, of the 28.5 crore people who had registered for vaccination till June 12, only 14.25 lakh had registered through CSCs.

State-wise, CSCs in Uttar Pradesh continued to lead, having registered 6.24 lakh people for vaccinations, while Chhattisgarh CSCs registered 97,319 people as of July 6. Other big states such as Punjab managed to register only about 5,000 people during the last 25 days, while most CSC registrations in union territories and small states continued to be marginalised.

For example, CSCs in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, and Ladakh — which had managed to register 57, 39, 58 and 68 people, respectively, till June 12 — registered only a handful more in the last 25 days to take the tally to 111, 50, 116, and 69, respectively. CSCs in Lakshadweep, meanwhile, did not register any vaccine beneficiaries from June 12 to July 6, and the number was stagnant at 10.

One of the ways to augment these numbers was to provide some sort of incentive to the village level entrepreneurs (VLEs) running these CSCs, Dinesh Kumar Tyagi, Managing Director, CSC e-Governance Services India, told The Indian Express. “Ours is an enterprise model, an entrepreneurship model. The VLE has to spend his time, resources, competing infrastructure for this and he or she is not paid for it. So the reasons for slow registrations can be that there is no incentive built for the entrepreneur and, therefore, he or she is not aggressive as they can be in many other cases. They are accessible but the incentive has to be there for them,” said Tyagi.

He suggested that states step in and take advantage of the CSC infrastructure and use them for more than just vaccine advocacy. One of the ways, he said, was that states could provide a trained professional who could, apart from helping the VLE remove vaccine hesitancy in states, also vaccinate people at spot. “The VLE will go and bring the people around, do the required advocacy. It is up to the states to ensure that once they are registered, they are also vaccinated simultaneously. In states, the CSC is one channel for registration. States have their own network of ASHA and Anganwadi workers.”