When you are in the transportation business and people stop going out, it brings everything to a sudden stop. But that didn't stop Amit Lakhotia and his team at Park+. They took up a social cause instead — organising drive-through vaccination camps. What started in a parking lot of a mall in Gurugram has now spread to five cities and they aim to cover 15 cities and deliver two lakh doses a day soon.
A drive-through vaccination camp makes sense for Park+ because they have tie-ups with various parking lots across Indian cities. But Amit, the Founder and CEO of Park+, took up this mission because he felt people were apprehensive to go and wait at a vaccination centre. "The photos and videos of jampacked vaccination centres were being circulated on social media — in a single room there would be some 40 people sitting together, there was some anecdotal evidence of people getting contaminated from these crowded centres, or at least people were apprehensive of that. This was a problem. Then the second wave hit and it was evident that if we did not scale up the vaccination drives this problem would persist," said Amit. "I was reading about some of the drive-through camps in the USA. Then I went to the Gurugram CMO, Dr Virender Yadav, and proposed to have a drive-through here. After a little hesitation, he agreed to go ahead with the camps at a few locations," he added.
The first camp was organised at the DLF City Centre Mall, Gurugram on May 14, followed by camps in Cyberhub, Ambience Mall, DLF Mall of India Noida and World Square Mall Ghaziabad. The first public drive-through camp at a corporate site was organised at Candor Techspace Gurugram, managed by Brookfield Properties. "The response was phenomenal. People were very happy. While they had to wait for an hour in the car, it was safe. The first set of people who got vaccinated were the senior citizens — who you would be most apprehensive to take to a government hospital," said Amit. "This also started a domino effect. People who got vaccinated, now started urging their house helps and drivers to get vaccinated as well," he added and said that while in the past month they might have been able to vaccinate around 20,000 people, the effect has trickled down to different strata of the society. After their success in Noida, Gurugram and Ghaziabad, Park+ has started vaccination camps in Nagpur and Mumbai as well.
The process is easy. You register on CoWin and go to their site and book a slot. You would know how many doses are left, so there are no disappointed drives back home and no unnecessary waiting. The entire process takes less than 10 minutes but you'd have to wait for 30 minutes according to the government's directives before you can drive back.
