My take on vaccination for >45 and 18-44. Will try to explain it with an example from railway reservation system. A thread 1/n

Let’s take Tapaswini Express : Hatia(Ranchi) - Puri. Let’s assume it has 500 sleeper class seats. Railway reservation works on a principle of quotas. Ranchi comes under GNWL quota and Rourkela under RLWL. 2/n

What could happen is, the day reservation opens, Rourkela people exhaust their quota of 400 but Ranchi still has may be 90 tickets left till day of travel. Theoretically, there can be a situation whr the train travels with 90 empty berths and few people from RKL can’t travel 3/n

You ask, why not have 500 tickets open to all? The problem is, if we do that, Rourkela people will buy all 500 on day 1 and Ranchi won’t get a single ticket. (The numbers I gave are a bit extreme and exaggerated to illustrate the issue) 4/n

So what is the other option? A Rourkela guy can pay more, buy a Ranchi-Puri ticket under GNWL (90 berths are still avl) and put boarding point as Rourkela 5/n

If I extend this to vaccination, let’s say GoI opens vaccination to all, the number of <45 people are so huge that they will eat up everything. The 45+ and some FWs may not even get their 2nd dose which means their 1st dose will also be wasted. 6/n

So GoI could have done this GNWL/RLWL based quota system, isn’t it? Buy 100 vaccines, mark 50 under RLWL and 50 under GNWL? 7/n

This is exactly what GoI is doing. Except that GoI will buy GNWL and states will buy RLWL. Not sure if it’s the best solution but I think this is the reasoning behind the post May 1 vaccination strategy. 8/n

Again, IR allows a RLWL guy to buy GNWL by paying more if ticket is available. So why not <45 be allowed to buy a vaccine from >45 quota if vaccines are not being exhausted from their quota? 9/n

I don’t know the answer to this except this will make it too complex and my mind can’t think beyond this. Also, vaccine is a life saver, railway tkt nahin mila to bhi chalega. 10/10

An after thought. For now, state govts tell GoI that by the time our orders arrive, allow us to divert a small % to <45. We will make sure no >45 miss their 2nd dose. If there is a race condition, >45 gets priority.

But all this is too complex and based on prediction.