In a novel approach to promote COVID vaccination among the general citizens, the MP Police has come up with an incentive-driven motivation scheme. The cops have honoured the vaccinated persons with "I'm a patriot as I'm vaccinated" badge and have parallelly got "Stay away from me as I am not vaccinated yet" tags for those who have not yet gotten the jab. While this simple carrot and stick initiative is expected to scale the aspirational value of the vaccine, people have termed it as social humiliation than social awareness.
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Police personnel in Madhya Pradesh's Niwari district was seen pinning the badges of honour on those citizens who have been vaccinated. A police official told one of the commuters to spread the word about his vaccination felicitation to people to motivate them to get the vaccine shot. On the other hand, 'posters of shame' were also handed to people who have not gotten the jab.
While the positive reinforcement alone could have propelled the mass sentiment in favour of the vaccination, the negative shame has gotten a host of netizens to list out the various reasons why people have not been vaccinated yet. The Twitterati condemned the vaccination discrimination and called out the overall vaccine scarcity as one of the primary reasons for not being able to receive the jab.
The issues of the limited number of slots and vaccination centres along with hyped prices were also brought to light by the citizens. The drive was labelled as civic humiliation than social awareness by many, who are unable to book and procure the dose.
As yet, over 1,35 crore single doses of the vaccination have been administered in Madhya Pradesh. As per figures, the state has bagged the seventh position in the national list of vaccination achievement. It may also be noted that a quarter percentage of these doses has been clocked in by 3 urban centres of the 52 districts here. These include Bhopal, Indore and Gwalior.
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