India's Vaccine Inequity Worsens As Villages Fall Behind

In 114 of India's least developed districts - collectively home to about 176 million people - authorities have administered just 23 million doses in total.

Urban Indians are getting COVID-19 shots much faster than the hundreds of millions of people living in the countryside, government data shows, reflecting rising inequity in the nation's immunisation drive. In 114 of India's least developed districts - collectively home to about 176 million people - authorities have administered just 23 million doses in total. That's the same number of doses as have been administered across nine major cities -- New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Thane and Nagpur -- which combined have half the population. The disparity was even stronger last month, after the government allowed private sales of vaccines for adults aged under 45 years, an offer which favoured residents of cities with larger private hospital networks. For the first four weeks of May, those nine cities gave 16 per cent more doses than the combined rural districts, data from the government's Co-WIN vaccination portal shows.