RS Sharma, the CEO of the National Authority and chairperson of the empowered committee for CoWIN said that India’s COVID-19 vaccine delivery tech platform will accept the school IDs of children eligible for vaccination starting January 3, 2022. The top executive RS Sharma also added that the CoWIN system will be able to configure changes easily if the government decides to mix vaccines for a proposed booster dose.
“Anybody who is born in 2007 or before will be able to get vaccines. Children aged between 15-18 do not have voter ID cards and many of them may not have Aadhaar too, so we are now allowing school certificates and ID cards. There are currently 9 eligible documents to register on CoWIN, we will add school ID cards to this,” Sharma said in an interview.
CoWIN’s move to add school ID cards as an identity document comes days after Prime Minister Modi said children aged 15-18 will be eligible to receive a jab starting January 3, 2022. PM Modi also announced that healthcare, frontline workers and senior citizens aged above 60 with comorbidities will be eligible to receive a third precautionary dose of vaccine from January 10th, 2022, amidst the Omicron variant scare.
