or a long time, India has boasted of 'Target Zero’, a massive immunisation programme against smallpox in the 1970s that wiped out the deadly disease through a drive that was almost military in precision. It led to Halfdan Mahler, then Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), to call the programme “a triumph of management, not of medicine".
Come 2021, as the rest of the world prepares to vaccinate against Covid-19, India — a country with the world’s second-largest caseload at 10 million infections — will need to draw on its management skills again to tackle the looming challenge of delivering an affordable vaccine to 1.3 billion people, many living below poverty line in remote areas of vast expanses of the country.
The country is set to approve the jabs developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford in January. But experts say several determining factors, including population and an already strained healthcare system, pose the main challenges to smooth rollout.
