Where does India get vaccinated?

Today, vaccination is a keyword to save ourselves from various diseases. Vaccines have saved the lives of millions since their usage. Vaccines are important as a preventive major for various diseases. It is one of the revolutionary inventions in medical science. Humanity could defeat various viruses with the help of strong vaccines against them. Even during the COVID period, everyone was waiting for the assured vaccine for COVID.

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In India, children are vaccinated with various vaccines e.g. BCG, Polio, Measles, Rotavirus, influenza etc. The government of India has published a detailed timetable for each vaccine and for its every dose. The vaccination programme helped India to eradicate Poliovirus from India. The results after rigorously following the vaccination programme are positive for community health. These vaccines are available in various hospitals, clinics etc. We will look at what kind of health facilities are preferred in India.

In NFHS 4 and 5 the health facilities which are preferred for vaccination were also recorded. As a less developed or developing country, the maximum district shows one trend: most vaccination happens in public health facilities.

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As the above picture shows, during NFHS 5 most children are vaccinated in public health facilities. This situation remained the same even during NFHS 4. Unfortunately, the data for various districts is not available. If we see the same survey data, for children getting vaccines at private health facilities.

In this image, we can see that most of the districts are of light shade which indicates that, very few children are vaccinated in public health facilities. This trend is common for various districts apart from a few patches. These patches also do not reflect any particular pattern. The highest probability could be, the majority of the districts, where many children are vaccinated in private health facilities are urbanised districts e.g., Pune, and Nashik in Maharashtra.

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The range of public health facilities is very large from public hospitals to community clinics etc. The cost of treatment and vaccination at these locations is very less. It is very pocket friendly even for the rural poor in India. That could be the primary reason why public health facilities are more popular than private health facilities.