Inquiry Launched Over Discrepancies in Jhajjar TB Vaccination Data

Vaccines on Paper, Absence on Ground: Jhajjar Inquiry Exposes Gaps in Public Health Records

In several neighbourhoods of Bahadurgarh, official health records suggest a public health success story: tuberculosis prevention targets met, vaccination coverage completed, funds duly utilised. Yet for residents on the ground, the story reads very differently. Many say no health worker ever knocked on their doors, no survey was conducted, and no BCG vaccine was administered—despite their names appearing on government registers.

The contradiction surfaced after a formal complaint by local resident Anup Ahlawat, who alleged that entire colonies in Jhajjar district were falsely marked as covered under the tuberculosis elimination drive. When an inquiry committee began field verification, officials encountered repeated inconsistencies. Women whose names appeared on vaccination lists denied receiving any injections, while others said no medical teams had visited their areas at all.

What has unsettled authorities is not just the mismatch, but its scale. Records indicated near-complete coverage in zones that residents describe as untouched by any campaign. The gap between administrative data and lived reality has raised concerns about how performance is reported, monitored and validated within large public health programmes.

The vaccinations in question fall under the National Health Mission’s tuberculosis control framework, a nationwide initiative spanning more than twenty states. The programme depends heavily on local data reporting—household surveys, beneficiary lists and completion certificates—to measure progress. Any systemic distortion in those records risks inflating outcomes while masking failures in service delivery.

Officials involved in the probe have confirmed that registers, beneficiary lists and field reports are now being re-examined. Privately, some acknowledge that the issue goes beyond individual negligence and may point to structural weaknesses in monitoring mechanisms, especially where targets are prioritised over verification.

The complaint also alleges that BCG vaccine stocks worth several crores may have been diverted and sold illegally, a claim that, if proven, would elevate the case from administrative lapse to financial misconduct. The health department has so far not issued a public response to these allegations, nor clarified how vaccine inventories were reconciled with reported coverage.

Political attention followed after the matter was escalated to Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda and Haryana Health Minister Aarti Rao, prompting the constitution of an inquiry committee. District officials have since conducted site visits and recorded statements, but no consolidated findings have been made public. The absence of official briefings has only deepened uncertainty among residents and health workers alike.

Experts tracking the case note that large public welfare schemes often falter at the point where paperwork replaces physical verification. When registers are treated as proof of action rather than evidence to be tested, accountability erodes. Similar gaps are frequently exposed during independent financial and process reviews akin to auditing services in india, where discrepancies emerge only after records are matched against operational reality.

For now, the Jhajjar inquiry remains open. Whether it results in disciplinary action, criminal investigation or systemic reform will depend on how rigorously records are reconciled with what residents say—and on whether oversight mechanisms are strengthened beyond paper compliance. What is already clear is that in public health, numbers alone cannot substitute for presence on the ground.