Ministry of Electronics and IT has no info about who developed CoWIN, according to an RTI

In late Dec, the MietY had announced a challenge for strengthening the CoWIN, which will be a digitised platform for the roll-out of the vaccine in India

CoWIN or the COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network may be an application crucial to the Covid-19 vaccination drive but the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MietY) has "no information" about who developed it and the money spent on it, if one goes by a response to an RTI query.

Law student Aniket Gaurav had sought details of people who were behind the development of the app, the money spent on developing it, copies of communication between the industry and the government on developing the app among others.

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However, the MietY said on January 19, "with regard to information sought, no information is available with Innovation and IPR Division, MeitY". Gaurav had initially filed the RTI with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which transferred the query to MietY.

As the vaccination drive started on January 16, there were reports of technical issues related to the CoWIN app, which is used to register and acknowledge beneficiaries, allocate vaccination centres and monitoring recipients. It is also supposed to help authorities in monitoring the Covid-19 vaccines in real time.

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With the CoWIN app creating trouble due to technical glitches, it was also decided that the process went manual in several places.

In late December, the ministry had announced a challenge for strengthening the CoWIN, which will be a digitised platform for the roll-out of the vaccine in the country. Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had then announced Rs 40 lakh and Rs 20 lakh for two top winners.

According to the Covid-19 Vaccines-Operational Guidelines, the CoWIN system is an end to end solution that has utilities for the entire public health system from national up to the vaccinator level. It will allow allow the system to monitor the utilisation, wastage, coverage of Covid-19 vaccination at national, state, district and sub-district level.