Anaxee Digital Runners is leading India’s largest door-to-door rural vaccine awareness campaign named as Project Swaraksha. The Indore-based company is leveraging its pan-India coverage to not only address vaccine hesitancy in remote areas but is also making sure that around 10 Lakh people get volunteered to receive their first vaccine dose. Aiming to tap 23,000 of the distant villages and tribal hinterlands, entire management, resource allocation, onboarding, and data collection is being carried out digitally using the Anaxee app.
While villagers were learning to navigate through the digital process of registering themselves on CoWIN portal, government opened vaccination for 18+ age brackets, leading to a lot of demand for vaccination and limited supply. Misinformation and rumours about Covid vaccines combined with unavailability of slots created a virtual barrier amongst the rural population.
Dejected by this, the team at Anaxee took it upon itself to digitally assist rural population for vaccination. Since last one month, the company’s tech-savvy Digital Runners are working on the ground assisting people from deep rural interiors, also addressing vaccine hesitancy that has cropped up due to myths/misinformation about Covid vaccination. Vaccine hesitancy is not limited to geography but is a global phenomenon. Anaxee believes, it can be addressed only through structured counselling. The villagers are being counselled one on one and Runners are ensuring successful vaccinations. Runners being daughter/son of soil are able to connect to the people, solve their queries, assist them through the entire process from booking appointments to finally getting their vaccination certificates.
The Runners go through structured training and assessment before start of work. They need to report each activity on Anaxee App and get paid for every successful vaccination. This is unique opportunity for Runners to earn income while working on a social cause. Anaxee plans to generate employment opportunity for 50,000 Rural youth in the next 6 months.
With a bandwidth of less than 40 days, Project Swaraksha has already reached to 85000 villagers, across 22 states, 185 districts, and 1250 Tehsils with more than 3000 runners registered. The numbers are for anyone to access on Project Swaraksha’s live dashboard at https://www.projectswaraksha.in
“Once we started Swaraksha, it was just a matter of time we found the perfect partners in Sandeep Nailwal and Punit Agarwal from the Crypto Relief Community. The Crypto Relief is focused on deploying funds of USD 400+ million on Covid relief works in India through various implementation agencies. In phase-1 of Project Swaraksha, United Way of Bengaluru (UWBe) committed USD 1 million targeting 10 lakh rural citizens using funds from its donor Crypto Relief (IN COVID SUPPORT FZE LLC). Apart from Anaxee, a lot of other NGOs connected with Crypto Relief are also providing their volunteers in Project Swaraksha. Few State/Districts government have shown interest in getting into MOU with Anaxee to implement the project in their geography." Recently, Anaxee signed an MOU with Mon District, Govt. of Nagaland. Mr. Thavaseelan K, IAS, Deputy Commissioner, Mon was instrumental in bringing Project Swaraksha to Mon district.
“Deploying our resources was never an issue albeit covid since the majority of our operational management happens via our app. I think being technologically sound and data-driven from the start proved really helpful in materializing a task of this monumental scale. Still, I feel the battle is yet to be won and would certainly require similar yet extraordinary partnerships alongside private business houses, PSUs, NGOs, State governments, international organizations, health bodies, and other institutions. India offers as big a pie that anyone can ever fathom,” said Govind Agrawal, Co-Founder and CEO of Anaxee Digital Runners Pvt. Ltd.
