On Wednesday, 23 December, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) along with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) announced the launch of “CoWIN”, a grand challenge for strengthening the COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWIN) system - a digitised platform to roll out and scale up the mechanism for COVID vaccine distribution, nationally.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said “India‘s innovators have played a crucial role in our fight against COVID19. I invite innovators and startups for grand challenge to strengthen CoWIN platform for roll out of COVID19 vaccination program across India.”
According to MeitY, the top two contestants from the challenge will be rewarded with Rs 40 lakh and 20 lakh respectively post successful migrations of the developed solutions on the cloud on which the CoWIN is hosted, apart from their integration with CoWIN.
The challenge kickstarts with registration process at meitystartuphub.in on 23 December 2020 and is open for participants to apply till 15 January 2021. The top 5 applicants will be provided the CoWIN APIs (Application Programming Interface) to prove the efficacy of their solutions for possible integration with the platform.
According to MeitY, each shortlisted applicant at this stage stands a chance to win Rs 2 lakh covering their logistical requirements. The solutions once integrated with the platform through open APIs will be assessed for robustness and scalability.
To be launched on the MSH (MeitY Startup Hub) portal, a collaborative platform developed under the aegis of MeitY, the challenge invites “participation from talented and innovative startups and emerging technology specialists to augment and scale the CoWIN platform.”
MoHFW has identified seven focus areas of technology development to holistically address the likely limitations associated with complete and effective vaccine distribution system (VDS) and its seamless administration across India. These challenges try to broadly address the priority areas relating to infrastructure, monitoring and management, dynamic learning and information systems, constraints of human resources including technical capacities, vaccine logistics management and tracking enlisted beneficiaries for any adverse event following immunisation on real time basis.
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