The Odisha government has decided to include food cards with photos as a mandatory identity card for verification of benefit recipients prior to Covid-19 vaccination.
The State Health Office issued a notification to all district authorities on Wednesday.
The additional chief secretary (health) PK Mohapatra said that the inclusion of food cards with photo must be implemented as proof of verification. He brought this matter to light in a letter to all collectors, commissioners from five parishes, as well as CDMs and PHOs.
According to the CoWIN 2.0 guidelines, there are seven mandatory photo IDs to check the beneficiaries before vaccination. Recently, the government also introduced the Unique Disability Identification Card (UDID).
The food card is an official document of the state government and contains information such as name, gender, photo and age.
According to the state government, this step would further improve access for beneficiaries in the BPL / antyodaya category.
“You are therefore asked to convey the above instruction to all program managers / managers, vaccinators and verifiers to implement the same in the vaccination campaign and also to make it widely known in order to sensitize the citizens”, Mohapatra wrote in the letter.
Falls in Odisha
The state’s Covid-19 number rose to 8,63,061 on Wednesday when an additional 3,535 people tested positive for the infection, while 44 new deaths raised the state’s coronavirus death toll to 3,432, a health official said.
The state registered fewer than 4,000 new infections for the second straight day after mid-April as active cases fell below 50,000.
Up to 2,016 new cases were recorded in quarantine centers, while contact tracing found 1,519 new infections, he said.
Odisha now has 47,796 active cases as 8/11,780 people have recovered from the disease to date, including 6,799 as of Tuesday, the official said.
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