At TLF 2022, COWIN Awarded V&D Pathbreaker of the Year, Under Dr. RS Sharma's Chairmanship

At the 21^st edition of the Voice&Data Telecom Leadership Forum, held on March 22, 2022. The Voice&Data Pathbreaker of the year jury award was conferred to COWIN under the Chairmanship of Dr. R. S. Sharma, of UIDAI fame. A 10 member eminent Voice&Data jury, consisting of Industry stalwarts, influencers, and business leaders met on January 27, 2022, to deliberate on the nominees, and came up with Dr. Sharma’s name for the V&D Pathbreaker of the year Award,  2021.

In the history books of Black Swan events, the catastrophic Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 and 2021 will surely always rank among the top.

As the pandemic hit Indian shores there was disbelief, panic, confusion, and then pandemonium. The whole world was caught unawares. The country was grappling with the problem and desperately looking for a solution to save lives.

Winning over Covid through a Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network or CoWin became a priority.

CoWin was a technology-enabled platform with a simple aim – to simplify and speed up the vaccination process for citizens by:

• Creating a facility that enabled hassle-free Vaccinations for citizens.
• Provided vaccination center & availability information quickly, accurately and within reach
• Provided online vaccination booking slots without difficulty – simply using a mobile phone number
• And finally issued a Universally verifiable digital certificate

After the registration and the appointment, the platform would track the progress. And send reminders or confirmations.

But enabling all of this for a population of 1.4 billion, in a matter of months, anticipating the enormous volumes and scaling up in real-time to accommodate this wave, was a herculean task.

Only one person in the entire country was experienced enough to lead this project. The task was handed over to Dr. Ram Sewak Sharma (RS Sharma), the founding Director-General of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) which had delivered the Aadhar Identity project for every Indian.

Dr Sharma as the CEO of the National Health Authority (NHA) under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare was already managing several Ayushman Bharat programs -- including Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (AB -DM).

It wasn’t long before CoWIN was registering 20 million requests daily and enabling appointments for 4-5 million vaccinations. At one point CoWIN delivered 2.78 crore SMSes in a single day (that is 30 million messages a day, unheard of for one platform).

The CoWIN website was receiving 55,000 hits per second. Only a highly robust and resilient architecture would be able to endure this without crashing.

Simultaneously CoWin created many user-friendly features like a dashboard for transparent data sharing with citizens, linking it to passports for easy international travel documentation, easy to download certificates anytime and availability in all major Indian languages.

It has enabled 1.6 billion vaccinations as of today. The highest in the world.

CoWin served as the backbone of India’s vaccination drive – it has helped save millions of lives.

For this unparalleled feat of delivering an essential service to citizens, at a time of unprecedented crisis, we are truly honored to acknowledge the vision of Dr. R S Sharma under whose leadership the CoWIN portal came to life in record time.

Voice & Data confers the Path Breaker of the Year 2021, Award to COWIN Platform and all its partners and stakeholders who enabled this marvel of technology.