After India expanded its vaccination drive to include people aged between 18-44 years, booking an appointment on CoWin, the COVID-19 vaccine scheduling platform, has been nothing short of a tedious task. But techies and coders found a workaround to book the slots by running scripts to automate the process. It was good alternative for end users, but only while it lasted. To put an end to this practice, CoWin app has now been updated to include Captcha verification.
From finding an available slot to logging in to the CoWin website, validating OTP and finally booking the appointment, coders managed to automate the entire process using the Application Program Interfaces (APIs) of CoWin. But this process is now roadblocked with Captcha verification, which requires human intervention.
"Breaking captcha requires the knowledge of Optical Character Recognition that can read them, which cannot be done by the majority of the people who are now using scripts to book vaccination slots" a techie was quoted as saying by MoneyControl.
While introducing Captcha verification solves on part of the problem, the bigger issue with the platform remains unaddressed, critics suggest. In fact, the process of booking an appointment for the jab is only made cumbersome.
Since the automated scripts check for the vaccine slot availability multiple times in a single minute, only then it has been able to get the appointment slot. This may not be humanly possible for the masses, let alone people who are not tech-savvy or without access to a smartphone or a personal computer.
4-digit security code
In order to minimise errors and the subsequent inconvenience caused to the citizens for online appointments for vaccination, the government introduced a new feature of "four digit security code" in the CoWIN application, which works similar to the way you would give your code before starting your Uber trip.
"It has been noticed in some instances that citizens that had booked their appointment for Covid vaccination through the CoWIN portal, but did not actually go for vaccination on the scheduled date, have received notification through SMS that a vaccine dose has been administered to them. Upon examination, it has been found to occur largely on account of the Vaccinator wrongly marking the citizen as vaccinated, i.e. an instance of a data entry error by the vaccinator," Union Health Ministry said on Saturday.
Before administering the vaccine dose, the verifier/vaccinator will ask the beneficiary about his/her 4 digit code and then enter the same in the CoWIN system to correctly record the vaccination status.
The ministry claimed that this will ensure that, for such citizens who have booked an online appointment, the data entries regarding vaccination status of a citizen, are recorded correctly and only for those who book online appointments and avail the services at the centre where they have booked the appointment.
(Additional inputs from agency)
