India Inc seeks to use CSR funds for staff vaccination | Economic Times

MUMBAI: Indian companies want the government to approve their corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds deployed to vaccinate employees and to let them choose the vaccine after regulatory approvals are cleared saying this would be an ideal scenario for a public private partnership for the expansion of the Covid-19 vaccination drive.The recommendation came from the industry association FICCI and consultancy firm EY, who have estimated that 30 crore (22% of population) prioritised individuals will be inoculated by August 2021 and another 50 crore by the end of 2022.A study titled ‘Protecting India: Public Private Partnership for vaccinating against COVID-19’, released on Monday has also recommended that those people who have the ability and are willing to pay for the vaccine should be permitted to do so, irrespective of government definition of priority population.“While India has been a powerhouse for vaccine production and distribution, vaccinating over a billion people is a first, and appears to be a daunting task which requires current capacities to be scaled up extremely fast,” said Sangeeta Reddy, Chairman FICCI. Ms Reddy is also the joint MD of Apollo Hospitals.The government has encouraged private sector to help the vaccine roll out and the study found 81% of survey respondents from private healthcare industry were willing to inoculate front line workers in local areas and 75% were willing to inoculate their local communities."The challenge of producing, distributing and administering the vaccine to the population in the shortest possible time is formidable, more so for a country like India given our population, geographical spread and skewed health infrastructure across urban and rural areas and between the states," said Kaivaan Movadawala, partner, healthcare, EY.As long as the supply of vaccine is controlled and also specifically earmarked by the government for such private sector use, any kind of hoarding should be prevented, the EY-FICCI report said.India currently has three vaccine candidates in advance stage of development, with two more reaching the phase stage 3 by March. The task of vaccinating the initial 20% of the population alone will require 1.3 lakh-1.4 lakh vaccination centres, nearly one lakh healthcare professionals to carry the vaccination drive and two lakh support staff/ volunteers to support the vaccination programme.