India administered a record-breaking 88 lakh vaccine doses on June 21, on the first day that the government’s revised vaccine policy — in which it is procuring 75% of the vaccines and sending them to states as per need — came into force. While the Union government aimed at keeping up this rate, a day later, however, the number dipped from 88.09 lakh to 54.24 lakh doses on June 22, Tuesday.
The Union government has also recieved criticism that it made some BJP-ruled states slow down the vaccination exercise during the weekend, so as to inflate the numbers of June 21. Madhya Pradesh, for example, went from administering 692 doses on June 20, to administering 17,44,657 doses on June 21, and then falling to 4,842 doses on June 22. The state had been seeing a fluctuation in the number of doses administered in the run-up to the vaccination drive on June 21, but the spike on Monday and the fall on Tuesday were the highest ever. Another state that showed a dip in vaccination numbers on Tuesday was Haryana. Haryana administered a total of 37,537 doses on June 20. The number went up to 5,45,554 on June 21 and fell to 76,638 on June 22.
Karnataka, which recorded the most number of vaccine doses administered on June 21 across India, also saw a steep fall on June 22. While a record 11,69,547 doses were administered on Monday, on Tuesday, it fell to 3,95,468. This however is still more than the average number of doses that the state had been administering, which ranges around 2.5 lakh doses per day.
However, it cannot be said that most states had a steep fall after the record-breaking vaccination drive. While states like Tamil Nadu (4.44 lakh doses on June 21 and 2.23 lakh doses on June 22) and Kerala (from over 2.6 lakh doses on June 21 to 2.3 lakh doses on June 22) saw the numbers dropping a day after, states like Uttar Pradesh saw more vaccine doses being administered on June 22 (7.68 doses on June 21 and 8.21 doses on June 22). Himachal Pradesh saw an increase from 99,951 doses administered on June 21 to 1,20,772 doses administered on June 22. States like Jammu and Kashmir saw a similar number of doses administered on both days - 38,038 on June 21 and 38,665 on June 22.
Source: CoWIN
NK Arora, the Chairperson of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation in India (NTAGI), said that India aims to vaccinate at least one crore people every day. “Our capacity is such that we will easily be able to administer 1.25 crore doses of COVID-19 vaccine every day,” NK Arora said on Tuesday.
Source: CoWIN
The Union government has said that it aims to fully vaccinate the entire adult population by December 2021. As per Health Ministry data at 8 am on June 23, India has administered 29.46 crore doses. India has vaccinated around 4 percent of its population. A TOI report states that in order to achieve its December goal, the number of doses administered every day should range around 88 lakh, like it was done on June 21. If, like NK Arora says, India administers over 1 crore doses every day, the adult population in India will get vaccinated by November 2021.