Chennai, June 29(BPNS)

The Tamil Nadu finance minister, PTR Thiagarajan has said that in situations like Covid -19, a federal system of approach was necessary to manage the situation better. He was referring to the details of the vaccination not being available with the states and instead, it is with the centre. The Finance minister of Tamil Nadu was interacting with reporters after inspecting vaccination camps at Madurai along with state commerce minister P. Murthy.

Thiagarajan said that the CoWIN portal where the details of the vaccinated people are available is a classic example as to why the country needs a federal approach to situations. He said, “ The details of the vaccinated populace is available only with the centre and not with the states as it should have been.”

He said that the corporation of Madurai has successfully brought the second wave of the Covid under control and said that the district was well prepared as far as health infrastructures are concerned. The minister said that there were sufficient beds, oxygen concentrators, oxygen generators and Covid care centres in Madurai.

Thiagarajan said that five lakh people have received the vaccine in Madurai and of this 4.71 lakh have received the first dose while 90,000 have received both the doses of the vaccine. However, the minister said that as the government and the administration was preparing to counter a third wave of the pandemic as directed by the Chief Minister, the non-availability of the vaccination details was posing a hindrance.

He said, “ As the CoWIN portal is a centralized system, the details of vaccinated people are available only with the central government  and this is creating a hurdle to implement a pilot project to identify the vulnerable people and monitor them continuously.”

PTR Thiagarajan said that the state government is going to write to the central government seeking details of the vaccinated population in the state and said that the Madurai district administration has 70% of the details of the vaccinated people in the district through the vaccination camps. However the full details are with the central government.

The Minister said, “We need to analyse the full details of the vaccinated population to understand as to which part of the city has a larger number of vaccinated people and where there is a lesser number.”

He said that this information was important to tackle the third wave of the pandemic and added that the state was expecting the centre to share the details within the next few days.