Not less than nine states have reportedly under-utilized doses of the Covid-19 vaccine that was supplied to them between January and March, and which is said to have slowdown the immunization drive, according to central government data as per a report.
Notably, all the nine states mentioned, as per a report, are non-BJP ruled states- Rajasthan, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Delhi- they all have failed to utilize the vaccine doses to their fullest.
The top government was quoted in the report saying that “These states, despite having adequate supplies of vaccines from the Centre in January, February and March, failed to commensurately use those supplies to effectively vaccinate a large enough proportion of their respective populations.”
“In each of these states, the Centre supplied an increasing number of vaccines every month. A few states have contributed disproportionately to the slowdown in the nationwide vaccination drive.” the official added further.
Some officials had also criticized the demand made by states to decentralize the inoculation program.
Rajasthan, just like wastage, topped this one too. While 10.6 million doses were supplied to it in the three months, it utilized only 5.7 million doses. Congress-led Punjab and Chhattisgarh were no different; while Punjab used only 840,000 of the 2.9 million doses, Chhattisgarh used 1.9 million doses of the 4.3 million supplied to it.
In Kerala, 3.4 million shots were administered, while the total number of doses provided by the Centre was 6.3 million.
TRS-led Telangana utilized only 1.3 million out of 4.1 million doses supplied. Coming to YSR Congress Party-led Andhra Pradesh, it received 6.6 million doses, but the government only administered 2.6 million doses Jharkhand managed to utilize about 1.6 million of the 3.1 million doses it was provided.
Coming to Khan market group favourite, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, his government got 4.4. a million doses, but they only utilized 2.1 million.
Maharashtra which accounted for the highest number of covid-19 cases was also given the highest number of vaccine doses. It received 14.3 million doses from the central government till March 31 but utilised only 6.2 million doses.
All of these opposition-ruled states were the first ones to demand the decentralization in the vaccine policy however, they weren’t able to even fully utilize the doses provided by the central government.
