There has been more than six per cent increase in the number of fully immunised children in the country as compared to 2014 under Mission Indradhanush, Health Ministry said today.
Announcing the launch of phase-III of Mission Indradhanush on World Health Day on April 7, Additional Health Secretary CK Mishra said, "out of an estimated 85-90 lakh children who were left out of the immunisation programme, 38.7 lakh children were fully immunised and we have managed to reach out to 1.48 crore children in this entire drive. Every year our increase of fully immunised used to be one per cent. But now we are somewhere near more than six per cent jump this year".
'Mission Indradhanush' was launched on December 25, 2014 to immunise all children against seven vaccine preventable diseases namely diphtheria, whooping cough (Pertussis), tetanus, polio, tuberculosis, measles and hepatitis B by 2020.
The phase-III of Indradhanush will be carried out in 216 districts. The districts have been identified on the basis of monitoring of last two phases. 26 districts of phase-I have been dropped and 41 new districts which need focused attention added.
"This time, we will be doing additional 41 districts of which Assam has 4, Arunachal Pradesh-2, Bihar-6, Gujarat-3, Haryana-1, Madhya Pradesh-1, Maharashtra-4, Rajasthan-3, Telangana-1, Uttar Pradesh-11 and West Bengal-5," he said.
Of 41 new districts, 17 are completely new in five states including Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharshtra and West Bengal that were not part of either phase-I or -II.
During the last two phases of MI in 2015, a total of 20 lakh sessions were organised and more than 38.7 lakh children were fully immunised.
Phase-II will focus on accelerating the momentum by planning to target 50 per cent of estimated 70 lakh partially vaccinated or completely unvaccinated children.
"We do not want to lose momentum and therefore our focus is to help those states which are right now doing better than couple of years ago," he said.
