Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Monday, addressed the CoWin Global Conclave and said how technology is an integral part of India’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. He stressed again that vaccination is the “best hope for humanity to emerge successfully from the pandemic.” 

“…And right from the beginning, we in India decided to adopt a completely digital approach while planning our vaccination strategy,” PM Narendra Modi said.

He also conveyed his sincere condolences for all the lives lost to the pandemic. “There is no parallel to such a pandemic in 100 years. Experience shows that no nation, however powerful that nation is, can solve a challenge like this in isolation,” PM Modi said, adding that India’s CoWin is being prepared to be made open source.

“Indian civilisation considers the whole world as one family. This pandemic has made many people realise the fundamental truth of this philosophy. That’s why our technology platform for COVID vaccination (CoWin) is being prepared to be made open source,” Modi said.

PM also talked about why they made the COVID tracing and tracking app.

“Technology is integral to our fight against COVID-19. Luckily, software is one area in which there are no resource constraints. That’s why we made our Covid tracing and tracking App open source as soon as it was technically feasible,” Modi said.

What is CoWin

CoWin, the COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWin) system, is a cloud-based IT solution for planning, implementation, monitoring among other things regarding the COVID-19 vaccination in India.

India has been using a vaccine intelligence system called eVin for many years under its universal immunisation programme, and CoWin is just an extension of it. eVin (electronic vaccine intelligence network) provided real-time feedback of vaccine stocks, power outages, temperature fluctuations among others.

Earlier in the day, India reported a single-day rise of 39,796 new COVID infections, which took the tally to 30,585,229, while the death toll climbed to 402,728, with 723 more fatalities, the lowest in around 88 days, according to Union Health Ministry data updated on Monday.

The active cases dropped to 482,071 and comprise 1.58% of the total infections, while the national COVID recovery rate has improved to 97.11%, the data showed.

India’s COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16.

It went past  60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, crossed 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19.

India crossed 2 crore cases on May 4 and 3 crore on June 23.