Even as the Central government introduced an additional security measure to stop malpractices in booking of slots for COVID-19 vaccination, techies across the country seem to have found a way around as they continue to hog the jab booking.
Since the government announced to open up vaccination for people above 18 years of age, there is a rush to get vaccination at the earliest among the youngsters and they are trying every option available for that.
The quest for booking a slot, which has become virtually impossible for common people owing to its tiresome functioning, CoWIN platform, has turned vaccine-seekers towards techies who have developed some platform to automate the process of slot booking.
The automatic solutions offered by techies have got people divided with many of them have blamed it for pushing the life-saving vaccine out of reach of common people who are not tech-savvy.
On Saturday, many social media users pointed out that even after adding captcha verification in the slot booking process, techies managed to subvert the process. The techies of India's Silicon Valley have been blamed for their role in what many called a "scam" wherein 1,500 vaccination slots were booked within 30 seconds in Bengaluru city.
How techies book vaccine slots
Several techies have developed programmes for methods to run scripts for searching vaccine shots in real time using public Application Program Interfaces (APIs) on CoWIN platform. API is a set of codes that enables data transfer between a software product to another.
Several programmes developed by techies search for vaccination slots from CoWIN platform and alert users if any slot is available.
However, these programmes seem to have failed after the Central government recently blocked access to real time slot availability data by third party programmes.
Some techies have developed processes that require some knowledge of coding and programming and enables very fast slot booking by the user. The process of booking was almost automatic before the government introduced a captcha verification, which requires human intervention.
Undaunted, now they have made some fixes and overrides even the captcha verification and can book slots on Andriod platform. The techies have even listed step-to-step guide to complete the process to overcome the new security measures.
Glitches in CoWIN platform
A lot of people complaint of faults in the slot booking process - from finding an available slot to logging in to the CoWIN website, validating OTP and finally booking the appointment. Finding slots and booking them are nothing sort of any tedious task.
People often vent out their ire on social media against the government's vaccine booking platform. The issue is such that Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray has written a letter to the Central government seeking its permission for a separate app for COVID-19 vaccination.
"Seeing the sudden surge in the number of citizens wanting to register for vaccination nationally, there is a fear about the app malfunctioning or crashing, as it did on day 1 of registration for the 18-44 age group," the chief minister wrote in the letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
