the poor coverage of measles vaccination and later doses of basic vaccines like those for polio diphtheria pertussis and tetanus dpt are pulling down the proportion of fully immunised children this indicates a poor mechanism to track children already registered in the immunisation system despite a mother and child tracking system mcts being in place since 2009a recently released nso report on health for 201718 shows that from over 94 coverage for the bcg vaccine given at birth coverage fell to just 67 for the measles vaccine given between 912 months the poorest coverage among all basic vaccines needed for a child to be counted as being fully immunisedsimilarly from 94 coverage of the oral polio vaccines opv birth dose the coverage went down with every subsequent dose to reach 80 by the third dose the dpt vaccine coverage went from 91 coverage for the first shot given at six weeks to 78 by the third shot at 14 weeks this meant that indias proportion of fully immunised children remained at around 60 in 201718 not much different from the national family health survey of 201516 which found it to be around 62while this was a huge improvement from just 44 in 200506 the budget allocated for immunisation has also jumped from rs 473 crore in 200506 to approximately rs 2000 crore allocated for the universal immunisation programme uip excluding shared costs such as staff salary establishments etcindias immunisation coverage has remained low relative to its neighbours in sri lanka 99 of children are fully immunised in bangladesh the coverage for dpt3 was 98 and for measles was 93 in 2018 according to the world health report 2020 in nepal the coverage for the third shot of dpt was 91 and that for measles was 69a child is considered to be fully immunised if she has received bcg three doses of opv three shots of dpt vaccine and the measles vaccine all these if delivered on schedule are within the childs first year with measles being the last there are booster shots and vaccines for other diseases but they do not count for considering a child fully immunisedthe central governments mission indradhanush launched in december 2014 set the goal of ensuring full immunization for children up to two years of age and pregnant women the govt identified 201 high focus districts across 28 states that had the highest number of partially immunized and unimmunized children the government said the increase in full immunization coverage was just one percentage point per year earlier but had increased to 67 percentage points per year through the first two phases of mission indradhanusha 2017 districtlevel study on routine immunization in haryana led by dr shankar prinja of the community medicine department in pgimer chandigarh noted that the challenge of decreasing dropouts and enrolling the ones with no immunization at all had become ever more daunting as the country added a pool of 125 million partially immunized children each year according to the nso survey