NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday held a review meeting with district magistrates of over 40 districts, having low COVID-19 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 vaccine.
Among the listed districts, the North West District of the national capital was also included. However, the name of the district was removed a day before the meeting. The list featured 40 such districts located across Jharkhand, Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Maharashtra and Meghalaya, among other states.
"We received mail from the ministry on Tuesday that we are not required to participate. They said they took incorrect numbers. They took zero plus population of the district. My target was about 15.77 lakh but they took the target population of 32 lakhs, which is zero plus for North West district. Infact, the population of 18 plus is only 15.77 lakh. So that’s why they removed us from the list," said North West District Magistrate Chestha Yadav.
The list was already printed before any clarification from the North West Delhi, the District Magistrate noted. Last month, the national capital achieved the target of two crore vaccination, accumulating both first and second doses.
From January 16 this year, the doses administered in the city reached a weekly high of nearly 11 lakh between June 26 and July 2, before seeing a dip. It reached an all-time high of 11.6 lakh jabs between September 18 and 24.
As per officials, the North-West district had the highest number of doses administered among all the revenue districts. Modi asked the officials to develop micro strategies keeping in mind the experience so far to go for saturation coverage of vaccination by addressing the gaps at local level.