CoWin does away with Captcha check; registration for COVID vaccination to become quicker

The official platform for COVID-19 vaccine booking CoWin application developers have decided to do away with the Captcha check for registering for a shot. This will speed up the process of registration that has been slowed down by several glitches that already exist in the program. Many citizens were unable to book an appointment for the available slots due to the feature which required a user to enter the captcha. As per the user reports, the CoWin captcha sometimes failed to register or offered the wrong combination.

The alternate to this is the introduction of a four-digit code that beneficiaries need to produce at their vaccination site to prevent bots or algorithms from gaming the slot booking process. Several technical companies have come up with ways to ease the process of booking for vaccination as it is currently the most important step to control the virus spread. Recently, a freelance developer Sushrut Kasture had come up with a novel Chrome extension, 'CoWin Booking' for citizens to easily book the slots.

Speaking about programs run by other applications, CoWin Chief R S Sharma said that the applications that according to Chief, had no additional advantage other than alerting beneficiaries about vacant slots in a designated area. 

CoWIN portal available in regional languages

On Friday, the health ministry informed that the CoWIN portal has now been made available in Hindi and 10 regional languages. These regional languages include Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu, Gujarati, Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Odia apart from English. With this, the government also announced that 17 more laboratories will also be added to the INSACOG network to monitor the variants of COVID-19. 

Government refutes reports of no jabs despite booking on CoWin

On Monday, the Government had refuted reports suggesting that a successful booking on the CoWIN platform for a vaccination slot does not assure one of a COVID-19 vaccine jab and called it "baseless and incorrect". With vaccination drive ramped-up, Russia's Sputnik V which is said to be the third COVID-19 vaccine to be administered in India made its debut on the application nearly two weeks ago. So far, 20 crore people have been vaccinated out of the population of 138 crore. Several states have also been floating global tenders to procure the vaccine due to a shortage in supply.