It proves that the persons assigned to vaccinate the public had sold them in the black market for personal gain
It is shocking to learn that between 1.5 million and 2.4 million anti-COVID-19 doses of vaccines procured by the government itself, donated by friendly countries or received from the UNCOVAX programme have been unaccounted for. The government had started inoculating the people two years ago after India donated 1 million doses of Covishield vaccines in the second week of January. Furnishing his replies to the parliamentary Education and Health Committee the other day, Health Secretary Roshan Pokharel made a disturbing revelation that up to 2.4 million doses of vaccines of various brands had gone missing or that there was no record of them with the government agencies. And the government has not launched any inquiry into the missing doses of vaccines, for which the government had spent billions of rupees from the state's coffers. As of now, the government has procured 12 million doses of vaccines while receiving around 29 million doses in donations.
In total, Nepal has received 40,388,840 doses of vaccines of various brands. As per the government record, a total of 28,322,008 doses of vaccines have been administered as of Tuesday. It means there must have been a total of 12,066,832 doses of vaccines in store. But there are only 8,400,000 doses. It shows that a total of 3,666,000 doses of vaccines have been unaccounted for. While administering the vaccines, 1-1.5 per cent of the vaccines might go to waste. Only 1.2 million doses should have gone to waste in this way. But it is surprising to see that more than 2.4 million doses of vaccines have been unrecorded.
Then, who is to blame for the missing or unaccounted for vaccines? Nepal has been giving vaccines to children against polio, BCG and measles for decades, and there had been no reports of such irregularities being practised while launching such campaigns across the country. The way such a large quantity of vaccines have gone missing or remain unrecorded indicates that the persons assigned to inoculate the people with the COVID-19 vaccines had sold them in the black market. Sporadic reports of the vaccines being sold to desperate individuals at exorbitant prices, ranging from Rs 7,000 to Rs 30,000, have now been proved, which means there had been a black-marketing of vaccines when they were in short-supply at some point of time. But no action was taken against the wrong-doers and that there had been no monitoring from the ministry.
After much damage has already been done, the parliamentary Education and Health Committee has told the Health Ministry to keep updated records of the vaccines provided to the public every evening. It has also asked the ministry to increase inoculation centres to reduce crowds at the vaccination centres and to ramp up PCR tests and widen contact tracing to keep the virus at bay. There is a standard procedure of storing vaccines and distributing them upto the inoculation centres. But it seems that the concerned agencies did not follow the standard procedures while dispatching them across the country, nor did they make the health ministry officials accountable for their actions. After this shocking revelation, the government should launch a thorough inquiry on this issue and punish the guilty for their crime.
Power to Bajura
In utter frustration at having to endure 10 hours of power outage daily, civil society members of Bajura have padlocked the office of Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA), the state-owned utility company. They have demanded that the district headquarters, Martadi, be connected to the national power grid for uninterrupted supply of electricity. A small hydropower plant supplies power to the district headquarters, which is insufficient, and plans to connect it to the national grid are moving at a snail's pace. According to the locals, all that the NEA has done in the past three years is install electricity poles.
Like most of the other hilly districts of Sudurpaschim Province, Bajura has been neglected for decades.
It lags behind in development in all sectors, from education to health, and roads construction to power supply. But holding rallies and padlocking NEA's office are not going to help improve the situation in the district. The district has representatives in the provincial assembly and in the parliament, who must be nudged into taking action at the earliest.
Connecting the district to the national grid would help make use of the power that is going to waste due to overproduction.
A version of this article appears in the print on January 20, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
