Nimisha Niranjan was mindlessly tapping through her Instagram stories on the night of May 18 when one of the posts grabbed her attention. The post had a WhatsApp number that people could contact to book a Covid-19 vaccine slot for people between the ages 18 and 45. Niranjan, 22, had been trying to book a jab for weeks and thought this could be her way to get vaccinated.
She sent a message immediately asking if the unknown person could book a vaccine slot for her. The person said they could. They said they were getting “early notification” of slots opening up and would charge 3,000 rupees (£29.10) to provide “assistance” to people booking. “This money was not even for the vaccine but just to book the slot,” says Niranjan, who works in the hospitality sector in Bangalore. “They asked for my ID details. I thought it was a scam and denied it right away.” Apart from being uncomfortable sharing her Aadhaar (India’s national ID) details with a stranger, she was also irked by the idea that they were charging money for something that is provided for free.
Over 3,000 kilometres away from Niranjan, in the northeastern part of India, a similar situation has been playing out. A group of individuals in the state of Assam have created a mechanism that has automated 70 per cent of the online vaccine booking process, which helps them book slots faster, charging around Rs 400 – although this is dynamically priced based on different cities – to anyone who asks them for help.
As India has scrambled to curtail its devastating second wave of Covid-19, which has seen the country move past 300,000 officially recorded pandemic-related deaths, its drive to vaccinate people has gone digital. The government has opened up the API of its vaccine booking technology – CoWin – to everyone to help create tools that automate searching for a vacant vaccine slot. But the result of combining India’s low digital literacy and unequal access to the internet with vaccine shortages has created chaos. Profiteers are using bots and writing code to book vaccine slots and charging people to do so. The chances of getting a vaccine have been tilted in the favour of the rich, the educated and tech-savvy.
So far India has only managed to fully inoculate three per cent of the population – after starting its vaccination efforts in January. CoWin has been central to the vaccination drive in India from the beginning. Despite the technical glitches it faced during the initial days, the government has continued to insist on using this platform, which many say, is nothing but a data collection drive. On May 1, the government opened up vaccination for people between 18 and 45 years. But there was a catch: you can’t just walk in to a hospital and get a jab.
People have been required to register on the government’s online vaccination platform CoWin, book a slot and then go to a vaccination centre. In a bid to get as many people to register on the official vaccination platform, the government allowed the platform’s APIs to be used by developers to build tools that could help Indians receive notifications whenever the slots opened up. In the last three weeks, thousands of coders in India have created bots, tools or apps on top of the CoWin system for themselves, their close friends and family and, in many cases, for strangers. At the time of writing, a search of ‘CoWin’ on GitHub gave 1,764 public repository results. There are some startups such as fintech firm Paytm that are helping people with slot alerts.
But with an acute shortage of supply, the race to get a vaccine has turned into a scramble. There are racketeers such as the one Niranjan came across, charging people to book vaccination slots. There are also people from cities who are using these alerts to find slots in rural areas, taking away someone else’s chance of a jab, who perhaps doesn’t have the means to make this booking to get inoculated.
For anyone between the ages of 18 and 45 to be able to book a slot, they first have to either go to the CoWin website or use the contact tracing app Aarogya Setu or the government services app Umang. There they need to enter their phone number and wait for a one-time password (or OTP) to be able to log in and check for available slots. If there is no activity, users are automatically logged out after 15 minutes. Since the registrations opened up, 53 million people have registered (as of May 14) of which 4.8 million have been vaccinated.
Between slots running out within seconds and minutes and a time-consuming registration process (many have complained of delayed OTPs), developers have stepped in to try and create an almost automatic booking process. Some developers have also created tools that help them stay logged in for longer than 15 minutes by automatically detecting the OTP.
In case of automated bookings, the code is typically used to enter the mobile number, validate the OTP, check for slots and then finally book one. These bots can also book up to four slots at once, which isn’t possible manually anymore. “I know of one guy who built a bot that auto-books a slot and there are many more doing the same,” says a young coder who runs a popular alert system, requesting anonymity. “There have also been instances of paid bots that charge large sums of money but it’s become really hush now fearing backlash from others.”
To tackle the growing bot problem, the Indian government introduced captchas right before a booking could be finalised to try and separate bots from humans. In response, people have simply built smarter bots. Some of these bots use captcha-solving services where developers pay $0.50 and break 1,000 captchas with an 80 per cent success rate. Others use their own machine learning models giving them a 90 per cent success rate. One such bot was able to book more than 15 slots over the weekend – sometimes within seconds of them opening up.
Anushka Jain, an associate counsel with the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organisation, says that while she understands that inoculating India’s 1.366 billion population is a huge logistical challenge, CoWin excludes a large number of Indians. “There are people who aren’t fluent in English, don’t know how these systems work, how OTP or captcha code works, and then there are people who don’t even have access to the internet,” Jain says. Add to that the bot problem and for many people booking a vaccine becomes impossible. “Even if someone knows how to book, they are unable to because the slots are snatched up as soon as they appear.”
The government says the CoWin portal is the “backbone” of the Covid vaccination drive. “The assertion that functionalities of CoWin are available to automate functions, ranging from notification to slot reservation is fallacious,” Ram Sewak Sharma, head of the CoWin platform recently wrote in an op-ed in the Indian Express. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest this is not the case.
Sharma admitted CoWin “may not be perfect” but defended the system’s lack of privacy policy and potential future use of facial matching technology to check people’s identities. “Vaccination of a large population cannot be managed without a technological backbone,” he wrote. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare did not respond to a request for comment. On May 24 officials admitted CoWin could exclude people who don’t have access to the internet or mobile phones and started allowing some limited walk in appointments where people can register on site.
Meanwhile, some coders are looking at ways to expand their alert systems into smaller Indian cities to include more people. Over two weeks ago, Berty Thomas, a programmer in the south Indian city of Chennai, was unable to book a vaccination slot for himself. He saw that the limited slots for the 18-45 age group would fill up within minutes. Thomas decided to write a script over the CoWin API that would quickly give him details on how many slots were available in his city. This way he was able to find a slot for himself. He decided to share this with his friends and as more people reached out to him, Thomas realised the need for such a tool and started expanding it to other cities beyond Chennai.
“I saw that people were coming and refreshing to check for slots. So instead of people doing that, I thought it would be better if I could use the same script to check regularly over the day and whenever a slot is available, send an alert,” says Thomas. “That’s how this concept of Telegram alerts started.” His website, under45.in, lets people select where they live and then adds them to a relevant Telegram group that shares updates on vaccine availability. As of May 26, Thomas’ tool was being used by over 2.3 million people across 614 Telegram groups.
He’s now working on adding smaller cities and towns to his list to ensure more people have the chance to get a jab. “The concept of CoWin itself is a problem because it requires people to have the internet and a smartphone to book a slot,” says Thomas. “But I have been told that many people have used these [Telegram] alerts to book for others who don’t have access, so I will continue to add smaller cities and promote this.”
Despite all this, demand is still disproportionately higher than supply. Thomas says that the Bangalore group has more than 80,000 people but slots open up for only 200 to 300 vaccines each day. Niranjan, who is part of the same group, gets hopeful every time her smartphone lights up with a Telegram notification. “I am able to see the slots but haven't actually been able to get one," she says. “For now, I have given up hope.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
