

“If you are 18+ and live in Bengaluru, the only way to get vaccine appointments is to use python scripts that ping CoWIN’s public API and set up notification alerts via Telegram, Twitter, or SMS,” he tweeted. Praveen Gopal Krishnan, chief operating officer of the online business publication The Ken, described the vaccine drive as a “ hackathon” on Twitter. In Bengaluru, a city home to the country’s biggest tech companies, competition for vaccinations was made all the more difficult as coders hacked their way to appointments. We’re all trying to survive the system we’re in.” “Those who can navigate this information economy are doing it. A Reuters report found that India was vaccinating fewer people every day, from 4.5 million a day on April 5 to 2.5 a day by April 23. Populous states like West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana announced that they would not be vaccinating adults below 45, simply because they didn’t have enough vaccines to do so. Over the last three weeks, states around the country have reported vaccine shortages. It’s highlighting India’s yawning digital divide, one that severely affects the country’s poorest during a deadly public health crisis. But as India’s daily coronavirus death toll reaches 4,000 deaths a day, for Indians who struggle to get online - let alone hack code- the vaccine remains out of reach. The site has an open application programming interface, or API, which makes it easy for coders in the know to iterate on the government-run appointment system.
#Crush crush 18+ hack software
The software developer and dozens of software engineers around India like him are building code on top of India’s already strained vaccination site.

By 2 p.m., he had received his first dose of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.įor Indians in the 18–45 year age group, access to the vaccine is available only through the government-run online portal. that day, finished at 11 a.m., and successfully booked a vaccination appointment by noon.

So the developer, who spoke to Rest of World on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash, did what he knew best: he built a bot to hack the government vaccination site’s code. He went back to book again, this time at a private hospital, but by then, the vaccination slots were being taken minutes, sometimes seconds, after he loaded the website. He managed to get a slot at a government hospital through the country’s newly launched vaccination portal, CoWIN, but when he arrived for his appointment, the hospital had already run out of vaccines. Amid a deadly second wave of coronavirus cases and a crushing shortage of vaccines, he was one among hundreds of millions vying for the vaccine. When India opened Covid-19 vaccination appointments for the 18–45-year-old age group last month, a 30-year-old software developer was already preparing to book his slot.
