Mission Indradhanush 3.0: Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan launches intensified initiative
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New Delhi, Feb 20: Union Health Minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, has launched the Intensified Mission Indradhanush (IMI) 3.0. Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, and Bihar Health Minister Mangal Pandey also attended the occasion through video conference. The Union Minister also launched the IMI 3.0 portal and released the Operational Guidelines for IMI 3.0 and the awareness material/IEC package developed as part of the campaign.
Dr. Harsh Vardhan expressed his elation at the elaborate preparations to immunize every mother and child and informed that the Intensified Mission Indradhanush 3.0 will have two rounds starting from Feb 22 to Mar 22, 2021. Focus of the IMI 3.0 will be the children and pregnant women who have missed their vaccine doses during the COVID 19 pandemic. It will run across 250 districts or urban areas across the 29 States or Union Territories. The Central govt launched IMI 3.0 initiative in order to provide immunization to the pregnant women and children free of cost in India.
The scheme will strengthen and re-energize the immunization programme and will help to achieve full immunization coverage for children and pregnant women rapidly. The mission also aims to reach the unreached population. It will reach to them with all the available vaccines under the Universal Immunization Programme (UIP). The beneficiaries will be identified and vaccinated during the two rounds of IMI 3.0. Each round will be for 15 days each. Beneficiaries from migration areas and hard to reach areas will be targeted as they may have missed their vaccine doses during COVID 19.
Mission Indradhanush was launched in Dec 2014 with the aim of fully immunizing the unvaccinated or partially vaccinated children under UIP. The scheme targets children aged under 2 years and pregnant women for immunization. The mission incorporated immunization programme against 12 Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (VPD) namely, Whooping cough, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, meningitis, tuberculosis, hepatitis B, pneumonia, Haemophilus influenzae type B infections, rotavirus vaccine, Japanese encephalitis (JE), measles-rubella (MR) and pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV). The rate of immunization coverage under the initiative has increased to 6.7 per year per year through the first two phases of ‘Mission Indradhanush’.
The Intensified Mission Indradhanush was launched in 2017 to reach child aged under two years and pregnant women who were left uncovered under the routine immunisation programme. Under this mission, greater focus was given on urban areas which was left under the Mission Indradhanush.