That’s the Nationalized Centrally Driven Vaccination Programme.1
The article in Scroll that I linked to yesterday was the easy part. The much more difficult part is to work out what might come in its place.
We (Murali Neelakantan and I) attempt to outline such a plan in this document. (PDF version 1.0 here)
It is a document written literally on the fly, and there are bound to be errors. Equally, there are bound to be aspects we have not thought of at all, or not thought out well enough. That’s the point of this post: please, read and let us know what we’re missing, and how it can be made better. If it is the most hare-brained thing you’ve ever read, let us know that too – but please, also do tell us why you think so.
Please note that we will continue improving upon the Google doc as we go along, so it will naturally keep on changing.
Finally, if you find merit in the arguments we have made, please, help it reach a wider audience.
Thank you!
(@ashish2727 for me on Twitter, and @grumpeoldman for Murali Neelakantan on Twitter)
- As you can tell, marketing is not our forte[↩]
Making states compete against each other for a limited supply product is bad policy, whichever way you look at it. Given India’s free market framework for health care (which exists in parallel to state provided healthcare), I can understand having a different price of vaccine for the private sector versus the public sector. But why must each state be pitched against the other? Makes no sense and is reminiscent of mid-2020 in the US when states had to compete for buying limited supplies of PPE equipment. Ashish can this decision be explained with the help of economics? I’m a lawyer so am limited in my grasp on this, except to say that it seems to be violative of the Constitution, in letter and spirit.