Chennai: Nilgiris district has achieved 100 per cent vaccination of its tribals overcoming several challenges, including accessing the remote locations to convincing the local people who were initially hesitant about being vaccinated.
It’s the first district in the State to achieve this milestone. Nilgiris Collector J Innocent Divya said they had completed the first phase of vaccination of all the eligible 21,800 tribals belonging to the communities such as Todas, Kotas, Kurumbas, Paniyas, Irulas and Kattunayakans from 438 hamlets in the district, which has a tribal population of 27,500.
Divya said that the tribal people live in remote areas in small units — sometimes as small as five to 10 families. Around 90 per cent of the tribal people in the area have route connectivity while 10 per cent are yet to be covered as they live deep in the forest.
She added: “Initially, there was a lot of hesitancy among the people because many rumours were doing the rounds. In the first wave, tribal communities were unaffected, none of the colonies had seen even a single positive case. In the second wave, tribal people who were working elsewhere had contracted the infection and as they are a close-knit community, the infection started spreading.”
After hearing about the special vaccination camps for the tribal communities, Health Minister Ma Subramanian had assured the district administration of special quota of vaccine doses to inoculate them all by the month end when he visited the place on 6 June.’
The Collector said, “with the assurance from the Health Minister, we put in place a concrete action plan to complete the task. We also roped in various NGOs working with the tribal groups to assist us and create awareness on the importance of vaccination through local songs and memes.”