India Administered About 220 Crore Covid-19 Vaccine Doses Through CoWIN, Which Issued Digital Certificates That Dozens of Countries Agreed to Recognise

India’s Covid-19 vaccination drive began on 16 January 2021 and had administered 220.66 crore doses (about 2.2 billion) by 2 April 2023, according to the Union Health Ministry’s bulletin that morning. The ministry listed 95.21 crore second doses and 22.86 crore precaution doses (boosters) inside that total. The drive ran on CoWIN, the online platform the ministry built to manage appointments, vaccine stocks and certificates.

The Economic Survey 2022-23 put coverage at 97 per cent of eligible beneficiaries with at least one dose and about 90 per cent with both, as of 6 January 2023.

The first day, 16 January 2021

The Prime Minister launched the drive on 16 January 2021. The ministry’s report for that day, based on provisional counts, recorded 3,352 vaccination sessions and 1,91,181 people vaccinated, with another 3,429 in defence institutions. A total of 16,755 personnel worked at the session sites. Covishield went to every state and union territory that day, and Covaxin to 12 states.

The next day’s release put the running total at 2,24,301 people, with 17,072 vaccinated on the second day. States had been advised to hold sessions four days a week so that routine health services were not disrupted, and only six states held sessions that Sunday.

From 100 crore to 200 crore in nine months

The health ministry’s release of 9 November 2021 dates the 100 crore mark to 21 October 2021. The 200 crore mark came on 17 July 2022, when the ministry’s count at 1 pm stood at 2,00,00,15,631 doses across 2,63,26,111 sessions. The release says the drive took almost nine months to reach 100 crore and another nine to reach 200 crore, and that the highest single day was 2.5 crore doses on 17 September 2021.

The same release says 71 per cent of vaccination centres were in rural areas and more than 51 per cent of doses went to women. Both figures are the ministry’s own.

What CoWIN was built to do

CoWIN stands for Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network. The Economic Survey describes it as a cloud-based system developed as an extension of the earlier eVIN (electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network) platform. It says CoWIN tracked stock in real time at national, state and district level, and credits that tracking with cutting vaccine wastage. That is the Survey’s own assessment.

In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha on 15 March 2022, the Minister of State for Health listed what the portal did: online or walk-in registration, appointment booking, instant digital certificates with a correction option, a 12-language interface, a mobile app for vaccinators, stock management, real-time dashboards and tracking of adverse events after vaccination. CoWIN was linked to the Aarogya Setu and UMANG apps, and registered users received automatic text messages with appointment and dose reminders.

The Survey adds figures on access. Registration accepted any of 10 photo identity documents, so Aadhaar was not required, and up to six people could register on one mobile number through the national Covid helpline. Even so, 84.7 crore of the 104 crore CoWIN beneficiaries registered between January 2021 and September 2022 were linked to Aadhaar. How that identity system works is covered in Aadhaar, the world’s largest ID system. The Survey also counts more than 2.6 lakh vaccinators, 4.8 lakh other team members and 29,000 cold chain points behind the drive.

The overseas offer of the CoWIN software, and what is documented about countries using it, is set out in India’s digital public infrastructure abroad. The ministry’s March 2022 reply says nine countries had sought India’s cooperation on it.

The certificate and the countries that accepted it

After each dose, CoWIN sent a text message with a link to a digital certificate, the ministry told the Rajya Sabha. The Economic Survey says the certificate was digitally verifiable and was designed at par with WHO guidelines to help international travellers.

WHO publishes its own specification for such certificates, called Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates (DDCC). It is an HL7 FHIR implementation guide, a technical standard for health data, with a vaccination-status version known as DDCC:VS for proof of vaccination and continuity of care.

On 9 November 2021 the health ministry said 96 countries had agreed to mutual recognition of vaccination certificates, or recognised Indian certificates for travellers fully vaccinated with Covishield or WHO-approved or nationally approved vaccines. It named Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and the United Arab Emirates among them, and said an international travel certificate could be downloaded from the CoWIN portal.

The Ministry of External Affairs keeps a separate list of mutual-recognition countries, dated 18 November 2022, with 43 names including Australia, Singapore, Switzerland and Vietnam. The two lists come from different ministries and dates, and neither page explains how it counts.

WHO has since built a network for checking certificates across borders. Its Global Digital Health Certification Network is open to member states, and WHO says participation is voluntary. WHO began onboarding countries already in the European Union’s Covid certificate network in June 2023, and opened full onboarding on 30 September 2023. WHO’s FAQ page names no participating country, India included, so WHO’s own pages do not show whether CoWIN certificates verify through the network.

Covishield and Covaxin

On 3 January 2021 the health ministry published the findings of the drug regulator’s expert committee. Serum Institute of India in Pune presented Covishield, a chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine made with technology transfer from AstraZeneca and Oxford University. The firm’s overseas data on 23,745 adults showed overall efficacy of 70.42 per cent, and it had a 1,600-person trial running in India.

Bharat Biotech presented Covaxin, a whole-virus inactivated vaccine developed with the Indian Council of Medical Research and its National Institute of Virology in Pune, which supplied the virus seed strains. Its phase III trial had enrolled about 22,500 of a planned 25,800 volunteers. The committee recommended both vaccines for restricted use in an emergency, and said it backed Covaxin “in clinical trial mode” as an abundant precaution to give more options against mutant strains.

WHO listed two versions of the AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use on 15 February 2021, one made by AstraZeneca-SKBio in the Republic of Korea and one by the Serum Institute of India. Covaxin followed on 3 November 2021 as WHO’s eighth Covid-19 vaccine listing. WHO reported 78 per cent efficacy against Covid-19 of any severity from 14 days after the second dose, recommended two doses four weeks apart for people aged 18 and over, and asked Bharat Biotech to keep generating data for full licensing and prequalification.

How firms like these make a batch and get it released is in how a vaccine gets made the Indian way.

Vaccine Maitri, the doses sent abroad

Vaccine Maitri, the government’s name for its Covid-19 vaccine supply abroad, began in January 2021. A written reply in the Rajya Sabha on 7 December 2021 said India had supplied 723.435 lakh doses (72.3 million) to 94 countries and two UN entities by 29 November 2021, as grants, commercial exports or through COVAX, the international vaccine-sharing scheme.

A PIB document of June 2025 gives a larger total: 30.12 crore doses (301 million) to 99 countries and two UN bodies since January 2021. Of these, 1.51 crore doses were gifted to more than 50 nations and 5.2 crore went through COVAX. The document does not break out the rest.

What studies of the effect found

Three peer-reviewed papers, two on India and one global, put numbers on the effect. They are observational or modelling studies, not trials.

A test-negative study in Faridabad, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, covered April and May 2021, when the Delta variant dominated. It compared 2,379 people with confirmed infection and 1,981 without. Full vaccination with Covishield gave an estimated effectiveness of 63.1 per cent against infection (95 per cent confidence interval 51.5 to 72.1) and 81.5 per cent against moderate-to-severe disease. That second estimate is wide, with an interval of 9.9 to 99.0, because only one fully vaccinated person was among 84 moderate-to-severe cases. The work was funded by India’s Department of Biotechnology and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and by Fondation Botnar.

A cohort study in Vaccine followed 4,183 symptomatic patients in South India in April and May 2021, of whom 17.9 per cent had received Covishield and 4.8 per cent Covaxin. Mortality was 0.2 per cent among the fully vaccinated and 12.9 per cent among the unvaccinated. After adjustment, at least one dose was linked to a risk ratio of 0.18 for death (95 per cent confidence interval 0.11 to 0.29). The authors concluded that full vaccination protected more than partial vaccination.

The global paper is a model fitted to 185 countries and territories, also in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. It estimated that vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths worldwide between December 2020 and December 2021 using reported Covid-19 deaths, and 19.8 million using excess deaths. The abstract gives no India-only figure.

What the published record leaves open

The day-one figure was provisional, and the next day’s release counted 2,24,301 people over two days, so the first day’s final total is not stated in the releases read for this article. The same release recorded 447 adverse events after immunisation across 16 and 17 January 2021, most of them minor, such as fever, headache and nausea. Three people needed hospitalisation, of whom two had been discharged and one was under observation.

On certificates, the 96-country and 43-country lists have not been reconciled in any document found, and India’s place in WHO’s network is not shown on WHO’s pages. The last daily bulletin used here, on 2 April 2023, recorded 2,799 doses in the previous 24 hours.