From Sunday, 28 June, you will see them again across Jammu — the booths outside health centres, the volunteers with cold boxes, the chalk marks on doorframes. Jammu & Kashmir is running a three-day Pulse Polio National Immunisation Day drive from June 28 to 30, and the numbers behind it are worth pausing on.
The scale of it
The campaign aims to give two drops of oral polio vaccine to nearly 18.92 lakh children under the age of five across the Union Territory. Jammu division alone accounts for roughly 8.24 lakh of those children — about 44 per cent of the entire target — making the city and its surrounding districts a centre of gravity for the whole exercise.
To pull that off, the health system has deployed more than 19,900 vaccination teams, 10,827 booths, 296 mobile teams and 271 transit teams stationed at bus stands, markets, railway points and other places where families pass through. Over 2,100 supervisors are overseeing the operation, coordinated by the State Task Force on Polio alongside the Health Department, School Education Department, ICDS, NHM, AYUSH and rural-development staff.
How the three days work
The pattern is the same one many Jammu families know by heart. Day one (June 28) is booth day — parents bring under-fives to a designated booth for their drops. Days two and three (June 29–30) go house-to-house, with teams covering children who were missed, marking each home, and catching kids at transit points and in vulnerable settlements so that nobody slips through the gaps.
Why now, when India is polio-free?
This is the question young readers reasonably ask: India was declared polio-free over a decade ago, so why the annual push? The honest answer is geography. Wild poliovirus still circulates in neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan, which means the virus is only a border away. Mass immunisation rounds keep population immunity high enough that even an imported case cannot find a foothold. It is precaution, not panic — and dropping the guard is exactly how hard-won gains get reversed.
It helps to remember how far this fight has come. India once reported the largest number of polio cases in the world; the country recorded its last wild-poliovirus case in early 2011 and was certified polio-free in 2014, the payoff of exactly these kinds of relentless, repeated immunisation rounds plus round-the-clock surveillance. That status is not self-sustaining. The oral vaccine's protection is built up through multiple doses, which is why a child who has had drops before still needs them in each campaign — the goal is blanket, repeated coverage that leaves the virus nowhere to spread if it ever crosses the border.
Where young Jammu comes in
If you are 15 to 30, this is one of the easiest pieces of civic good you can do, and most of it costs nothing. If there are under-fives in your home or extended family, make sure they get their drops on booth day even if they have been vaccinated before — the whole point is repeat coverage. If you are in college or part of an NSS, NCC or a campus society, polio rounds routinely lean on student volunteers for booth duty and awareness work; your nearest health centre or the School Education Department's local mobilisation team is the place to ask.
It is worth seeing the people behind the booths, because they are largely young too. Pulse Polio rounds run on an army of frontline workers — ASHA and anganwadi workers, auxiliary nurse-midwives, health students and local volunteers — who spend three days on their feet in the June heat, climbing stairs and knocking on doors so that no child is missed. The mobilisation muscle comes from the School Education Department, ICDS, NHM, AYUSH and panchayat-level staff working in lockstep. A friendly word, a glass of water or simply having your family's children ready when the team arrives makes their job measurably easier.
And the simplest contribution of all: counter the misinformation. Every round, a handful of families still refuse the drops because of something they read on a forwarded message. A calm word from someone they trust — you — often does more than any official poster.
The transit teams are a smart touch worth understanding. By stationing vaccinators at bus stands, the railway station and busy market points, the drive catches children who are on the move — travelling families, daily-wage households, anyone passing through the city during the Yatra season — exactly the kids most likely to be missed by a purely house-to-house sweep. It is the difference between high coverage and complete coverage.
Three days, two drops, one of the most successful public-health habits this country has ever built. It only keeps working if each round actually reaches every child — and in Jammu, that means more than eight lakh of them this week.
Source: Daily Excelsior — “J&K targets 18.92 lakh children in Pulse Polio drive”.
