A door-to-door survey is on by the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation to compile data on residents of its 41 wards and determine how many residents have yet to receive the first jab of the Covid-19 vaccine.

According to an official of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, the drive has already started and in Salt Lake civic teams are visiting different blocks in all three sectors of the township. The drive is being conducted so that the civic body has concrete figures on the number of unvaccinated residents across all age groups.

“We shall then send in a request for the specific number of doses required to the state health department. As it is, we are getting limited quantity of vaccines and our centres are finding it tough to deal with the number of people walking into health centres to get the shots,” the official said.

An official of the civic body’s health department said the corporation-run clinic and several camps organised across wards have administered around 80,000 shots. These figures are inclusive of both the first and second doses.

An official of the Bidhannagar sub-divisional hospital said they, on the other hand, have administered around 50,000 shots since the vaccine drive began and that the figure includes regular residents as well as special categories like polling personnel and police.

The civic official said that this, combined with the doses given by private hospitals, takes the figure up to nearly 2.8 lakh vaccines to have already been administered. “However the figures also include those who are not residents of any ward of the civic body but have taken their shots here,” the official added.

Apart from the figures collected by the civic body, several blocks in Salt Lake had tied up with private hospitals and conducted paid vaccination camps at community halls. Most of the primary health centres had to be shut due to shortage of vaccines, but BMC officials said they had been vaccinating frontline workers, hawkers and street vendors, and several wards had been organising vaccination camps to administer the second dose.

Jabs at home

Some councillors are also drawing up lists of residents who need jabs at their doorstep, even though there has not been any formal notice about conducting these.

Neelanjana Manna, co-ordinator of Ward 33, says about 300 people in her ward are still in need of the first dose. “I have appealed for more camps in my area as there are domestic helps, drivers and the like who would benefit from free vaccines. There is also a need for jabs at the doorstep for residents who are immobile and unable to reach camps at community halls,” she said.

Collecting this information would require co-operation from block committees. “This is because neither are the aged tech savvy enough to register themselves for any such online surveys nor would they like it if we showed up at their doorsteps when a contagious infection like Covid is raging. “A head count of immobile residents will be tough but we have to do it,” Manna said.

Tulsi Sinha Roy is ready with her homework. “There are two residents in my ward – a lady in Labony Estate and another in CD Block – who are immobile due to their advanced age. Several vaccination camps have been held in my area but these ladies will not be able to go over. We have to provide them vaccination at home and I have already informed the corporation’s health department about it.”

The chairperson of the board of the corporation’s administrators,

Krishna Chakraborty, admits to the need for such a service, “but we cannot go outside the purview of the rules set by the government. As and when such a facility is allowed we shall go ahead with vaccination at home,” she said.

Are you facing problems getting vaccinated in Salt Lake or New Town? Write to The Telegraph Salt Lake, 6 Prafulla Sarkar Street, Calcutta 700001 or email to saltlake@abp.in