New Delhi: Sending alarm bells ringing, India is now expected to face huge shortage of vaccines.
The Union government’s Central Procurement Agency (CPA) which was supposed to float tenders in February this year for procuring drugs and vaccines worth Rs 1,000 crores for the Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP) has expressed its inability to do so and has left it to the health ministry to procure them.
The CPA has claimed that since “there’s not enough warehouses to store these vaccines and drugs,” it will be not be able to procure them.
The Union governments’ immunisation programme could be majorly hit as it runs the risk of running shortage of seven crucial vaccines which include Diphtheria Pertussis Tetanus (DPT), polio, measles, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG), Hepatitis B, Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and Haemophilus influenza type B (Hib).
The entire process of procuring these vaccines and drugs should have started in February this year. With the CPA washing its hands off the Union health secretary has asked the health ministry to start the process of procurement of vaccines without any delay. At this juncture the health ministry is carrying out the immunisation programme across the country with the available stocks.
“At times demand for a particularly vaccine goes up in some states. Given the existing scenario this could become difficult as we are running short of vaccines and drugs,” a health ministry official said.
Generally the states draw up an estimate and acquire its annual quota of vaccines and drugs from the Centre.
If the health ministry fails to procure fresh stock in a couple of months it could possibly fail to supply the states with fresh quota. Though the health ministry intends to step up the process, things can get tricky as it now will have to re-start the entire process by floating fresh tenders.
