The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) along with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has announced the launch of a Grand Challenge for strengthening the COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWIN) system. 

 

CoWIN is a digitalised platform to be used to effectively roll out and scale up the mechanism for COVID Vaccine Distribution System nationally.

 

Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “India‘s innovators have played a crucial role in our fight against COVID-19. I invite innovators and startups for a grand challenge to strengthen the CoWIN platform for roll out of COVID-19 vaccination program across India.”

 

To be launched on the MSH (MeitY Startup Hub) portal, the challenge invites participation from talented and innovative startups and emerging technology specialists to augment and scale the CoWIN platform. 

 

The 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 immunization on a real time basis.

 

The Challenge kickstarts with registration process at https://meitystartuphub.in 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 lakh covering their logistical requirements. The solutions once integrated with the platform through open APIs will be assessed for robustness and scalability. 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.