2 days ago
The Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW) has been sitting on a recommendation from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to classify telecom field engineers as front-line workers, a series of letters exchanged between the Cellular Operators Association of India and the government revealed. “Department of Telecommunications (DoT) endorses the request of COAI [regarding treating frontline telecom workers as telecom warriors so as to prioritize them for receiving Covid-19 vaccination,” the department’s secretary Anshu Prakash wrote in a letter to their counterpart Rajesh Bhushan at the Health Ministry on March 16.
Despite the endorsement, Indian states have since entered into different forms of lockdowns cause by the second wave of the pandemic. Yet, the government guidelines have not been updated to classify telecom workers and vaccinate them on a priority basis like their counterparts. In many states, telecom workers are largely exempted from restriction