‘India became the world’s pandemic saviour’

NEW DELHI: ‘According to a certain section in the world, once the pandemic hits India, we would have become a burden to the world, but we took the approach of self-reliance and irrespective of whether we get any help from anyone in this crisis, we trusted in ourselves and placed trust in our capabilities. With this self-reliant approach that India took, the world that thought India would become a burden, it started to think that India would be the saviour,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a documentary explaining the vaccine journey of India.
The 60-minute documentary titled “The Vial–India’s Vaccine Story” that aired on Indian television on Friday night showcased India’s fight against Covid-19 and the country’s top leadership’s resilience and commitment towards developing an indigenous vaccine. The documentary was also the first ever documentary to feature Prime Minister Narendra Modi who spoke extensively on India’s vaccine journey and the making of the Indian vaccine.
Explaining the development phase of the vaccine, Prime Minister Modi said in the documentary that the government had taken up the cause of saving billion of Indians and for that, instead of looking to other countries, it decided to do whatever it can to develop its own vaccine.
“When the pandemic hit India, it was an unprecedented situation that the world had never seen. As the head of the government, it would have been foolish to think that the virus that was causing havoc even in the most developed countries would not reach us. In this we needed a solution and we had two options in front of us, one was to wait for some other country to make a vaccine or to leverage the science and scientists that India had and make our own vaccine. We took the second option, we created a scientific task force and decided to make our vaccine,” Prime Minister Modi said.
The documentary narrates the journey of the making of the Indian vaccine and carefully showcases the efforts made by the Serum Institute of India, Pune and how they had put in the hard effort of isolating the virus strain that was required as a first step towards the development of a vaccine. The documentary also showcases the effort of the scientist and healthcare professionals who toiled day and night to bring out the best vaccine in the shortest possible time.
India’s Bharat Biotech that developed the indigenous Covaxin was also showcased in the documentary with its Director, Dr Krishna Ella explaining his and Bharat Biotech’s journey in the development of a vaccine that was ready for clinical trials in just three months. This was the shortest time taken to develop any vaccine in the world.
For the development and research for vaccination, the Indian government had made Rs 900 crore available for the scientific community for its research and development.“The Indian government allocated Rs 900 crore for research in the development of a vaccine against Covid-19 right in the early days of 2020 and when the money was given, all the scientist were told that it is not necessary that everyone will get the result, but the research should be done with confidence,” Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said in the documentary.
With these words of the Prime Minister, confidence started to grow amongst the scientific community. Dr Balaram Bhargava, the then Director General of ICMR (Indian Council for Medical Research), said, “We decided to make our vaccine because we know we have a strong leadership at the top of the government and this leadership believes in self-sufficiency.”
Earlier in January this year, Dr Randeep Guleria, who spearheaded India’s Covid-19 task force, told The Sunday Guardian, “We proved them wrong, we proved the critics of India’s vaccination programme wrong, we proved all those who raised questions about how India would develop and vaccinate a large population like it has, wrong. If you see, in 2009 and 2010, when swine flu hit India, we had to rely on the WHO (World Health Organisation) for vaccinations. With respect to Covid, we developed and manufactured two vaccines in India and managed to upscale it immediately.”
The documentary showcased the journey and how India overcame the challenges it faced in vaccinating a one billion plus population, part of which lives in the remotest of areas. To address this challenge, India took the help of CoWin, an indigenously developed application for vaccination that the world had never seen.
The documentary narrated how Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisioned the challenge it could face in the vaccination drive and from the very first day he had tasked his officers to take the help of technology to plug the gaps that could hamper the process of vaccination drive in India. The government also took help of drones to deliver vaccines in difficult terrains in the shortest possible time. It also developed a special refrigerator with the help of electronics manufacturer Godrej that could maintain the cold temperature the vaccines required to survive even without electricity for 72 hours.
“India is the only country where a platform like CoWin existed and people could see where they could get vaccinated, what time they had to reach the vaccination centre so as to not overcrowd the vaccination centres. The app also gave details of when to take the second shot. Technology was ably used for it,” PM Modi said.
Dr Guleria had earlier said: “The vaccination program was a success because of the concentrated and coordinated efforts of the government agencies, policymakers, industry players and the general public. Everyone came together in alignment. Each player had a role in making sure that the vaccine was made available. They needed to establish a distribution chain, maintain a cold chain, manufacture syringes, swabs and needles alongside and ultimately ensure that the vaccine was reaching the areas where it was being demanded, reaching each vaccination centre. After vaccination, there was the additional work of uploading the data, ensuring there were no adverse reactions, making sure everyone got their certificates immediately. This was something I think even professionals abroad struggled with and that is when they realised that India is resilient and powerful with a strong IT Infrastructure.”
India’s vaccine development not only saved India, but India was one of the first country that not only thought about itself but also decided to help its friends who were in need. The country launched the Vaccine Maitri scheme through which it helped other countries by providing them vaccines. This effort was lauded by the global community and countries that speak of India’s giving nature, even today.
The Covid-19 that had hit India in March 2020 came across as an unprecedented situation even for the medical fraternity who had little or no knowledge then on how to deal with this virus that was virulent and a killer virus. The country, like the world went into a lockdown to protect its people as the carriers of the virus that was humans needed to be stopped to stop the spread of the virus. While knowing very well the hardships that people of the country would face, Prime Minister Modi not only decided to provide free ration to the country, but also to directly transfer money to the account of all the marginalised women in this country to support their family.
This journey from locking to unlocking the country and the struggle and the plight of the health care professionals that worked relentlessly and selflessly was also beautifully showcased in the documentary, “The Vial”. The documentary is conceptualised and produced by Colosceum Media and directed by Arun Bali.