CoWIN system

In news 

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) along with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has announced the launching of “CoWIN”

What is it?

CoWIN is a Grand Challenge for strengthening the COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWIN) system and a digitalised platform to be used to effectively roll out and scale up the mechanism for COVID Vaccine Distribution System, nationally.

About the challenge 

• To be launched on the MSH (MeitY Startup Hub) portal, a collaborative platform developed under the aegis of MeitY towards building meaningful synergies in the Indian tech startup space 
  • In order to facilitate MeitY’s vision of promoting technology innovation, start-ups and creation of Intellectual Properties, a nodal entity called ‘MeitY Start-up Hub’ (MSH) has been set up under its aegis. 
  • MSH acts as a national coordination, facilitation and monitoring centre that integrates all the incubation centres, start-ups and innovation related activities of MeitY.
• The challenge invites participation from talented and innovative startups and emerging technology specialists to augment and scale the CoWIN platform.
• The Challenge kickstarts with the registration process on 23rd December 2020 and is open for participants to apply till 15th 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. 
• Each shortlisted applicant at this stage stands a chance to win Rs. 2 Lakhs covering their logistical requirements. 
• The solutions once integrated with the platform through open APIs will be assessed for robustness and scalability. 
• The top 2 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

Seven focus areas

• MoHFW has identified seven (07) 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 
  1. Infrastructure
  2. Monitoring and management
  3. Dynamic learning and information systems
  4. Constraints of human resources-including technical capacities
  5. Vaccine logistics management and 
  6. Tracking enlisted beneficiaries for any adverse event following immunization on real time basis.