How I succeeded in getting vaccine slot on cowin portal

 India is undergoing a very difficult phase at this point of time, with Covid positve patients increasing exponentially, our resources are exhausted beyond imagination. One would think what went wrong in otherwise slowly but steadily picking up pace of normalcy. After year long WFH routine, offices were opening up, markets were all live and not to forget we planned mega events like elections, protests, religious congregations as if corona is a thing of past. In all this dull atmosphere, only ray of hope is the vaccination program rolled out by govt. of India. 

From 1 May onwards, authorities has opened registration for 18 years to 44 years candidates. After initially crashing down the servers due to mad rush for registrations, the portal is stable however users are still complaining of not getting slots. I have myself tried different combinations before coming to conclusion that there are no slots but its just a scam, as the centers would either show no availability or suddenly it will be completely booked. However I was wrong, wrong in concluding it to be scam and wrong in my approach for booking slots.

What should you know before going for slots booking.

As with anything else, people rush to get things done as soon as they can do, we are talking about a country where mobile phone flash sale records just don't matter now. Don't expect to open the app any time of your choice and find slots available near you. In my experience (Location Gurugram, Haryana), all free vaccine slots are opened a day before only, so don't bother yourself by searching for future dates you will find all unavailable. The slots are opened gradually for all the centers, for instance today first of the slot was available at around 11:30 AM and for the center when slots were opened last was 9:35 PM. The slots are booked within 5-10 mins of availability even the ones having 300 slots.

So, with above you can see even refreshing the screen all day is not going to help, you keep refreshing one center and some other center might get full without you knowing. I then looked up in the internet to find solutions and got to know that few techies are actually solving this very problem by making use of cowin API which are available for public to use. While most of the solutions work by searching on a portal and providing a consolidated status of vaccine centers by pincode or district, the one I found best was under45.in . 

How to use under45

Using this is very simple, just that you need to have a telegram account as pre-requisite. Once you open the url you will be directed to page as below to select your state and district.

Next step is to select your desired State and District combination where you are looking for registration.

Click on button with Telegram Icon and you should be able to join channel for your district, please not if your district is not in the list you can click on reply on this tweet link and request to add it.

Once you are added to the channel, you will get notification of each center whenever slots are opened in real time. Which will not only save you from searching all day, but also allow you to plan your centre wisely rather than booking just any center which may be far away from your place.

I was able to reschedule my appointment from Jhajjar (~ 30 Kms from my place) to within Gurugram in my proximity. Hope this will help you too to plan your vaccination.