7 Years of Mission Indradhanush

In News

• Mission Indradhanush was launched in 2014 as a special drive to expand full immunization coverage in India.
• It has completed seven years with immunization coverage among children aged 12 to 23 months increased to 76.4 percent.

About

• Ministry: 
  • Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW).
• Aim: 
  • To expand immunization coverage to all children across India. It aims to cover all those children who are either unvaccinated, or are partially vaccinated against vaccine preventable diseases.
  • Children across socio-economic, cultural and geographical spectrums in India are being immunized under this program.
  • Also the pregnant women are administered the tetanus vaccine, ORS packets and zinc tablets are distributed for use in the event of severe diarrhea or dehydration and vitamin A doses are administered to boost child immunity.
• Universal Immunization Programme (UIP): 
  • India’s Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) provides free vaccines against 12 life threatening diseases.
  • It provides life-saving vaccines to all children across the country free of cost to protect them against Tuberculosis, Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus, Polio, Hepatitis B, Pneumonia and Meningitis due to Haemophilus Influenzae type b (Hib), Measles, Rubella, Japanese Encephalitis (JE) and Rotavirus diarrhea. (Rubella, JE and Rotavirus vaccine in select states and districts)
• Phases: 
  • Phase I was started as a weeklong special intensified immunization drive in 2015 in 201 high focus districts for four consecutive months.
  • The Phase II of Mission Indradhanush covered 352 districts in the country of which 279 are medium focus districts and remaining 73 are high focus districts of Phase-I.
  • Phase III of Mission Indradhanush was launched from 7 April 2016 covering 216 districts. 
  • Phase IV of Mission Indradhanush was launched from 7 February 2017 covering the North-eastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. It was rolled out in the rest of the country during April 2017.
  • Around 97 lakh pregnant women have also been immunized under the Mission.

Significance

• Healthy India: Mission Indradhanush has ensured full immunization coverage to child and mother in eliminating diseases for building a healthy India.
• Meticulous planning of campaigns at all levels: Develop special plans to reach the unreached children in more than 400,000 high risk settlements such as urban slums, construction sites, brick kilns, nomadic sites and hard-to-reach areas.
• Effective communication and social mobilization efforts: Generate awareness and demand for immunization services through need-based communication strategies and social mobilization activities to enhance participation of the community in the routine immunization programme through mass media, mid media, interpersonal communication (IPC), school and youth networks and corporate.
• Intensive training of the health officials and frontline workers: Build the capacity of health officials and workers in routine immunization activities for quality immunization services.
• Establish accountability framework through task forces: Enhance involvement and accountability/ownership of the district administrative and health machinery by strengthening the district task forces for immunization in all districts of India and ensuring the use of concurrent session monitoring data to plug the gaps in implementation on a real time basis.

Issues

• Awareness: There needs to be awareness regarding immunization and life is a precious concept, which is completely missing.
  • Giving the vaccine causes fever and the parents do not want to sit at home to take care of the children.
• Different languages: Biggest constraint is migrants who speak different languages. It is very hard to convince them to get their kids vaccinated as immunization is not a priority for these migrant laborers.
• Reluctance against the vaccine: more than 28% of children were not vaccinated because their caregivers did not feel the need for vaccines, while not knowing about vaccines was the second largest cause of unvaccinated children.
• Not knowing where to go for immunization: Rural people have no idea where to get their children vaccinated.
• Wrong advice: By the people around or nearby, the cost of vaccination is too much and is not affordable by the poor people.
• Factory owners: don’t take responsibility or give an off as it is 24×7 work. The workers don’t wish to lose even one day’s wages to take care of the child.
• Side-effects of the vaccine: The BCG vaccine causes swelling, while the pentavalent vaccine causes fever for a day.

Source: AIR