India has a digital backbone around its Covid-19 vaccination that is “truly remarkable,” said Infosys co-founder and non-executive chairman of its Board, Nandan Nilekani, at a virtual event on Tuesday.
In conversation with Microsoft India president Anant Maheshwari, Nilekani discussed the role of technology amid the pandemic, how digital skilling is now more important than ever and how technology can be used to scale up ongoing vaccination efforts. The event was the first edition of ExpertSpeak, a curated dialogue series with industry experts, organised by Microsoft.
“We are the only country in the world where everybody gets a digital vaccination certificate immediately. And this can be printed, it can be on the person’s smartphone, it can be kept in the Digital Locker, (and) is encrypted, digitally signed, and it is QR coded so that we can authenticate that certificate anywhere- offline or online,” said Nilekani.
Appreciating the opening up of the vaccine as announced by the government on Monday, Nilekani said if there are 50,000 vaccination points, India can scale up to vaccinating 5-10 million people a day.
This article was originally published in Business Standard.
