In Rajasthan Villages, Outsider-Insider Tensions Over Vaccines

In Rajasthan Villages, Outsider-Insider Tensions Over Vaccines

        In Jajod village in Rajasthan’s Sikar district, local people on Saturday forced the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination for 18-44-year-olds to stop after discovering that most of the recipients were “outsiders”.

     As tempers flared between the residents from Jajod and those who had come from faraway places after booking slots at the government senior secondary school vaccination centre, the police were called in.

     “Around 80 people aged 18-44 were supposed to be vaccinated on Saturday. But after reaching the centre, we found that the majority of those who had got the slots were outsiders, and not from our village. Some had even come from other districts such as Churu, Bikaner, and Nagaur,” Mahavir Ranwa, whose wife Suman Devi is the sarpanch of Jajod, said.

   “We protested and stopped the vaccination because it is not fair that the inoculation will take place in our village, and we won’t get a chance while outsiders will get vaccinated. The Community Health Centre in Jajod is a Covid Care Centre, and villagers should be vaccinated first,” said Ranwa, who described himself as a member of the Congress party.

      Travelling through villages in Tonk and Sikar districts, The reporter has found that while there is an increasing rush for jabs among 18-44-year-olds as the disease spreads in rural areas, the shortage of vaccines has forced people to seek out slots even in faraway places, resulting at times in situations like the one in Jajod.

    At the government upper primary school in Akhtari village of Tonk district, 50-year-old Banna Ram Jat claimed that his wife Sugan Devi was older than 45, even though her Aadhaar Card says she was born in 1978, which made her only 43 years old.

(Source : Indian Express)