You now have to enter a Captcha while booking your vaccination

Users will now also have to enter a Captcha on Co-Win, India's Covid-19 vaccine scheduling platform, to book their vaccination slot, a move aimed at restricting some coders who were cornering slots by running scripts to automate the booking process. While this will curb people from trying to game the platform using scripts, it will also make the process of booking a slot more cumbersome as entering a captcha usually hampers user experience.   This development comes a day after Moneycontrol reported that techies are using their coding skills to get a jab, even as India grapples with a shortage of vaccines. Unlike the multiple Telegram groups and bots that alert users whenever slots open up, some also wrote scripts that not only searches for slots using the Application Program Interfaces (APIs) of CoWin, but also automates the scripts to schedule a slot.   These scripts check for the vaccine slot availability multiple times a minute. Once the slots are available, the scripts login to the CoWin website. The scripts are automated to input the mobile number, and check and validate the OTP generated and schedule a slot. Users will now have to enter Captcha, a feature that is used to differentiate bots and humans, to book their COVID-19 vaccination slot.   On May 6, CoWin chief RS Sharma challenged techies to show that scripts can be used to not just check the availability, which is allowed using CoWin’s application programme interface (API), but also book them. Sharma categorically denied that such tricks are possible as it requires One Time Password (OTP) to be entered, which he said, cannot be done by scripts. Many developers shared examples of how it could be done, and even suggested adding a Captcha, which has now been implemented. Captcha uses alphanumeric characters to distinguish humans from bots and requires human intervention. “Most people will not be able to automate this process,” said Anand, a techie.   “Breaking captcha requires the knowledge of Optical Character Recognition that can read them, which cannot be done by the majority of the people who are now using scripts to book vaccination slots” explained Anand. Vijay*, a techie from Bengaluru who used scripting to book a vaccination slot, agrees. “It is still possible to break but very few can do it,” he said.   While this makes the process equitable for everyone who is tech-savvy, it comes with its own downsides. For one, captcha makes it difficult for users, who are not tech-savvy or comfortable with English to use the application. Developers Moneycontrol spoke to said it only solves a part of the problem as reading the Captcha can also be automated. “As it is using CoWin to book slots in itself is an issue and makes it exclusionary. Introducing Captcha will not make it any easier,” says Anand. Vijay added that people who cannot read English will be left out unless it is implemented in multiple languages.   4 digit code The Government on May 7th, 2021 also added a new security feature to the CoWin digital platform, where users will get a "4 digit security code" to minimise errors for online bookings/appointments, which will come into effect on 8th May, 2021. This is to address the concerns of people who said they received an SMS that they had been administered a vaccine dose even when they did not go for vaccination on the scheduled date. This was due to a wrong data entry by the vaccinator. To minimise this, the vaccinator will now ask for the 4-digit code from the beneficiary before administering the vaccine.