Chhattisgarh High Court: A Division Bench of Prashant Kumar Mishra and Parth Prateem Sahu JJ. laid down allotment of vaccines in percentage to the ‘Antyodaya Group’, the persons belonging to the ‘Below Poverty Line’ and the persons belonging to the ‘Above Poverty Line’.
The present issue has come up before the Court regarding that the vaccine allotted to a particular category like Front Line Worker or Antyodaya or BPL (Below Poverty Line) remained unused in a particular vaccination center at the end of the day and the previous orders under the same PIL no. does not provide as to how the unused vaccines would be redistributed on the following day or any other day. Also the vaccine quantity allocated to Antyodaya category persons remains unused and at the same time persons belonging to other category and willing to be vaccinated returned without being vaccinated at the end of the day.
The vaccination programme is going on by distributing the following quota of vaccines to the eligible categories:
| No. | Category | Percentage of Vaccine Allocation |
| 1. | Frontline Workers | 20% of the total vaccine doses available |
| 2. | Antyodaya Ration Card | 15% of the remaining 80% vaccine doses available or 12% of the total vaccine doses available |
| 3. | BPL (Below Poverty Line) | 65% of the remaining 80% vaccine doses available or 52% of the total vaccine doses available |
| 4. | APL (Above Poverty Line) | 20% of the remaining 80% vaccine doses available or 16% of the total vaccine doses available |
It was submitted that non-utilisation of vaccines is, in fact, delaying the whole vaccination programme for the persons who are willing to be vaccinated, but they could not get the vaccination because the quantity allocated to their category is exhausted on a given date.
State submitted that the unused vaccines for any particular category are redistributed. The Court further listed the matter for 19-05-2021 for consideration regarding non-utilisation of Antyodaya or any other category vaccines at the end of a particular day and an affidavit to this effect shall be filed.
[Suo Moto WP (PIL) v. State of Chhattisgarh, 2021 SCC OnLine Chh 1110, decided on 17-05-2020]
Arunima Bose, Editorial Assistant has put this report together
Amicus Curiae: Mr. Prafull N Bharat
Advocate for the State: Mr. Satish Chandra Verma, Mr. V Giri, Mr. Vivek Ranjan Tiwari, Mr. Chandresh Shrivastava, and Mr. Vikram Sharma
Advocate for UOI : Mr. Ramakant Mishra,
Advocate for Railways: Mr. Abhishek Sinha,
Advocate for SLSA: Mr. Ashish Shrivastava
Advocates for the respective Interveners:, Mr. Sandeep Dubey, Mr. Palash Tiwari, Mr. Sudeip Shrivastava, Mr. A. V. Sridhar, Mr. Anumeh Shrivastava, Mr. Himanshu Choubey, Intervenor in Person.
