Battling to save the newborns in the State, Haryana Government fell short of achieving its vaccination goal of covering more than 2.5 lakh children under the second round of Centre’s ambitious ‘Mission Indradhanush’ aimed at expanding immunisation coverage to all children upto two years of age.
As per the statistics with Haryana Health Department, a total of 1,80,466 children were vaccinated during the second round of ‘Mission Indradhanush’ held from May 7 to 13 in all 21 districts of the State.
While the Health Department had set a target to cover more than 2.5 children in the second round, it fell short of its vaccination goal. On a positive side, highest number of children i.e. 21010 was covered during the campaign in Mewat district, which is known for extremely poor health indicators.
This time, the Department had taken assistance of maulvis to make the immunization programme a success among children under two years of age and pregnant women.
Notably, Mewat and Palwal were recorded as the worst districts as only 35 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively children were immunized during the first round in April.
As per the reports of District level Household Survey (DlHS) IV, 13 Haryana’s districts namely Faridabad, Gurgaon, Jhajjar, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Mewat, Palwal, Panipat, Rewari, Rohtak, Sira, Sonipat and Yamunanagar were found to have full immunization coverage of less than 60 percent. The state had launched the first round of ‘Mission Indradhanush’ in these 13 districts from April 7 to 13 and later, the second phase was rolled out in all 21 districts of the state in May.
Around 1.1 lakh children were immunised during the first phase of ‘Mission Indrashanush’ in the State. The level of immunisation in Haryana is 72 per cent which is far behind the immunisation level of the other progressive States of the country, according to the officials of Health Department.
The Mission Indradhanush, depicting seven colours of the rainbow, aims at covering all those children by 2020 who are either unvaccinated or are partially vaccinated against seven vaccine preventable diseases which include diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, tuberculosis, measles and Hepatitis B.
Haryana had become the first State in the country to launch ‘Mission Indradhanush’ in the entire State.