New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday gave a clarion call of “knocking at every door” for achieving full Covid vaccination asking magistrates of districts with low coverage to find everyone who missed their schedules.
Immediately after returning from his visit to Italy and Glasgow, the Prime Minister held a review meeting with 48 districts having low vaccination coverage.
The meeting included districts with less than 50 per cent coverage of the first dose and low coverage of the second dose of Covid vaccine.
The Prime Minister interacted with magistrates of districts, including in Jharkhand, Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, and others having low vaccination coverage.
During the interaction, the Prime Minister discussed the issue of vaccine hesitancy and the local factors behind it in detail asking DMs to take help of faith leaders.
He discussed a wide array of ideas that can be implemented for ensuring 100 per cent vaccination coverage in these districts.
He spoke about maximising community engagement through religious and community leaders and exhorted officials to ensure that the country widens its vaccination coverage by the end of the year and enters the New Year with renewed self-belief and confidence.
Addressing the gathering, the Prime Minister said that in this biggest pandemic of the century, the country faced many challenges but “one special thing was that it found new solutions and tried innovative methods”.
The PM urged the administrators to work more on new innovative ways to increase vaccination in their districts.
He said that even the better performing districts had similar challenges but they were met with determination and innovation.
Modi asked officials to develop micro strategies, keeping in mind the experience so far to go for saturation of vaccination by addressing the gaps at local level.
The Prime Minister touched upon the issue of rumours and misunderstanding about vaccination and suggested awareness as the only solution.He also asked the officials to change gears from arrangements made for taking people to the vaccination centre and for safe vaccination to administering vaccines from door to door.
He asked health workers to reach every house with passion ‘har ghar tika, ghar ghar tika’: vaccine at every doorstep, and gave a call for ‘har ghar dastak’—knocking on every doorstep to ensure full vaccination.
“Now we are preparing to take the vaccination campaign to each household. With the mantra of ‘har ghar sastak’, knock on every door, every household lacking the security net of a double dose of vaccine will be approached,” he said.
