How MyGov Covid app morphed into a one-stop vaccination helpdesk

What does it take to build and scale an application for 1.3 billion people? The right intent, partners, technology (tech), and a whole lot of cooperation.

The MyGov Corona Helpdesk chatbot was launched last year in March as the pandemic began taking hold in India. Initially aimed at providing credible information from India's government and global sources, the application has since added new and more useful features, such as providing users with their Covid-19 vaccination certificates, and now even booking their vaccination appointments through the chatbot. 

"The chatbot was launched in record five days from conceptualisation on March 13, 2020, to going live on March 19, 2020.  Within one week, the chatbot had 10 million users. Over time, more features were added. Today, we have more than 45 million users," said Abhishek Singh, chief executive officer (CEO), MyGov, and president and CEO, National eGovernance Division (NeGD), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. 

MyGov is the government's citizen-centric platform for crowdsourcing ideas on policies and government programmes. 

From the MyGov side, the effort around the chatbot is led by a team of five people, Singh said, who worked along with WhatsApp and business service provider Haptik to set up and maintain the chatbot. 

"To date, 45 million people have accessed the bot, 3.5 million have downloaded their vaccine certificates, and 1 million have booked their vaccination, all using the MyGov Corona Helpdesk chatbot. That speaks volumes about the trust the chatbot enjoys with Indians. We’re glad to have collaborated meaningfully, at every step of the way and are proud of this tech-solution that is so simple and easy to use and the resultant impact it has created since the past 18 months," said Shivnath Thukral, public policy director, India at WhatsApp Inc. 

He added that the WhatsApp teams work closely with MyGov and Haptik "with the single-minded focus to alleviate the distress the pandemic has been causing and to fill the need-gaps with appropriate solutions and deploy them to benefit the impacted people in the shortest time frame possible".  

How does the chatbot handle the scale and high traffic of users, especially around days when new announcements are made?

"The high traffic loads are handled 24x7. We use orchestrated deployment set-ups that are easy to scale and can be scaled up in seconds to cater to the incoming requests. The chatbot can process thousands of transactions per second," said a spokesperson for Haptik.

Making vaccination certificates available through the chatbot has provided a convenient and hassle-free experience to those who have used the feature. 

The integration with the CoWIN application programming interface allows data transfer between software applications.

"It took around a week to build the features for vaccination certificate download and another week to 10 days for the features for booking vaccination appointments," said Singh. 

The content on the chatbot is vetted by different ministries, including the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Ministry of AYUSH, Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Ministry of External Affairs, depending on the nature of content. 

The chatbot also uses artificial intelligence significantly, and the tech forms the core of the communications solution. 

It also supports interactive communication that is menu-driven and responds to random queries as well. In addition to English and Hindi, the chatbot understands Hinglish as well. 

The features available through 13 state bots also give responses in regional tongues. 

MyGov Corona Helpdesk

Stakeholders

• MyGov, WhatsApp, Haptik

• MeitY, MoHFW, MoAYUSH, MHA, MEA

• CowIN APIs

Statistics

• 45 million Unique users

• 3.5 million Vaccination certificate downloads

• 1 million Vaccination bookings 

Major traffic days

• Mann ki Baat during which the PM tweeted the number of the chatbot along with the PMO and the health minister tweeting details, in 2020

• When the vaccination certificate download feature and vaccine booking features were launched