I was going through the Co-WIN website today to book an appointment for my Covid vaccination when I realized that the Indian government offers open access to vaccination system data through public and protected APIs.
I've consumed APIs from Facebook, Twitter, and Cloud Service Providers but this was the first time that I came across an API that the government is providing. If you ask me about it, it is actually a very good initiative with the intent of keeping data open.
We can find open government data sets at data.gov.in and the APIs at apisetu.gov.in. Almost all the APIs are protected (You will need to get an API key from the relevant government department) but with Covid vaccines, they decided to publicly expose limited APIs.
Public APIs
We can find the public API at apisetu.gov.in/public/marketplace/api/cowin/cowin-public-v2.
With the public API, you can get the details of all the sessions available at vaccination centers for 7 days filtered by either the ZIP code or the district.
For example, the following curl command returns the list of sessions available for the next 7 days from today in my city Mysore (district code: 226).
curl -X GET "https://cdn-api.co-vin.in/api/v2/appointment/sessions/public/calendarByDistrict?district_id=266&date=02-05-2021" -H "accept: application/json"Since the default content type returned is JSON, unless you want to request a response in a different Indian language, you can open the url in your browser to get the response.
The APIs to get the state code and the district code can be found at apisetu.gov.in/public/marketplace/api/cowin/cowin-public-v2
With these public APIs, we will be able to set up something like an alerting system to monitor the availability of preferred vaccination variants in preferred vaccination centers at preferred dates.
Protected APIs
We can find the protected API at apisetu.gov.in/public/marketplace/api/cowin/cowin-protected-v2.
With the protected APIs, we can do so much more than the public APIs. We will be able to list the vaccination centers by latitude and longitude (think about searching for the nearest center based on your phone's GPS). We will be able to list, add and delete beneficiaries. Create, reschedule and cancel vaccination appointments. We will also be able to download appointment slips and vaccination certificates in PDF format.