Here's the story of roaring success for vaccination drive in tribal areas of North Eastern states

GUWAHATI: Vaccination drives against COVID-19  in tribal areas of The Northeastern states have been a huge success.

The health workers of each Northeastern state with tireless efforts carried out a vaccination drive against COVID-19 to inaccessible hilly areas and villages located at an altitude of 14,000 feet above sea level where people find it difficult to venture out of their homes.

The pace of vaccination has been pretty satisfactory in tribal-dominated areas of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Tripura, Meghalaya, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, and Sikkim, particularly in villages where health workers with the help of local communities are carrying out door to door vaccination.

A two-day vaccination camp was carried in Mago, India's last village on the Tibetan border, 35 kilometres from Tawang district in Arunachal Pradesh.

The majority of the people in this village drive their cattle to the Tibet border in search of greener pastures.

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Vaccinating this group of people was the biggest challenge considering the fact that many of them either return home with their herd late evening or sometimes even the next morning.

“We identified particular spots in Chuang, Lunar, Chigyap which are on route to the Mago village that these people usually take. So, we organized camps there to vaccinate them”, says RD Thangon, the Additional DC of camps.

Vaccination camps were also carried at Yaya Tasogai in Jethang, which is about an hour's drive from Mago village. Despite the fact that 16 shepherds were not vaccinated, a special camp was later organised just for them.

The route to Jethang and Mago village is highly inaccessible due to rocky terrain, yet health workers walked for hours with a vaccine box on their shoulders to ensure that the villagers were jabbed.

They even set up camps in Langthang village, situated at an altitude of 14,000 feet from the Tawang district.

Apart from Arunachal Pradesh, the pace of vaccination among the tribal community in other states of the Northeast is also quite satisfactory. In Nagaland, around 5 lakh people have already been vaccinated.

The onset of monsoon rains has further increased the challenges of conducting vaccination drives in these states.

Despite the torrential rains, health workers have been able to vaccinate people here with no waste.

In Dimapur, Nagaland, 185,652 people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 so far, among them, 163,544 were those who were jabbed with the first dose and 22,108 have received both.

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Health workers have succeeded in vaccinating a large chunk of people in Manipur's Ukhrul, Chandel and Senapati districts, which are 40 percent tribal-dominated.

The number of people here getting vaccinated through the walk-in, but the online registration process is also quite high.

Vaccines have also been delivered in villages located at an altitude of several thousand feet in the Champhal and West Xanthia hills of Mizoram and Meghalaya.

Initially, due to vaccine hesitancy, it was difficult to persuade people in the tribal communities of Tripura and Sikkim to get vaccinated, this was also because of certain practices and traditions, which entail worshipping a particular deity that prohibits being injected with any kind of needles.

The vaccination campaign team, however, cleared all confusion, assuring the villagers that getting the vaccine does not violate any kind of community or religious belief. Thereafter, the villagers turned up for vaccination in large numbers.

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