pune the health ministry is planning to put in place an appointmentbased system to vaccinate the target beneficiaries aged above 50 years under the nationwide inoculation programme for the priority groupsthe authorities have been sending sms alerts for the vaccination of the healthcare beneficiaries plans are afoot to develop a mechanism to help the people aged above 50 seek appointments and check the nearest vaccination siteram sewak sharma chairman of the empowered group of technology and member of the national expert group on vaccine administration told toi that the government was readying an additional software that would enable people aged above 50 to fix appointments for the shotsthe system will be on the lines of booking in railways this will be the model for the vaccination to be carried out for the common people aged above 50 years the registration will be done using help of the common service centres across the country the system will help them seek an appointment for which a separate software using arogya setu app will be enabled the mechanism will be ready before the government rolls out the vaccination drive for this target group said sharma who has recently also taken over as the chief executive of the national health authorityon being asked if aadhaar details would be used to authenticate the identity of the 50plus group he said the aadhaar coverage is above 95 there should not be an issue and the authentication will make the process simpler however the government will have to issue guidelines he saidat present the aadhaar verification process is being carried out for the healthcare and frontline workers besides theres a provision of a unique health id card that is being issued we have directed all the states to issue a digital certificate after the vaccination and the data have to be stored in the personal digilocker for further checks we are also generating digital unique health identification numbers for citizens who have linked their aadhaar cards for the vaccination programme to eliminate proxies sharma saidon cowin glitches leading to delays in the vaccination process he said new features were being introduced to make the app more citizenfriendly all other issues are being ironed out sharma said