Sunday morning. 8 AM sharp.
6,772 vaccinators will fan out across Mysuru.
Their mission?
Reach 2,19,521 children under the age of five.
Not 90% of them. Not 95%.
Every. Single. One.
Because one missed child is all it takes for a virus the world has nearly buried to crawl back.
In the 1980s, India was reporting over 200,000 polio cases a year.
Kids paralysed. Families shattered. A nation under siege.
Then came the slow, stubborn grind.
Drop by drop. Booth by booth. Child by child.
The last wild polio case in India was logged on 13 January 2011.
In March 2014, the WHO formally certified India polio-free.
A staggering public health win. But here's the catch nobody likes to say out loud…
👉 Polio-free isn't a trophy you put on a shelf. It's a status you defend — every single year.
DC G Lakshmikanth Reddy isn't leaving anything to chance.
From June 28 to July 1, the district turns into a coverage machine:
Day 1 is the booth blitz.
Days 2, 3, 4 are the house-to-house hunt for kids who slipped through.
Every school in Mysuru will nominate one student as a 'Polio Ambassador'.
Think about that for a second.
A child convincing another child's parent to show up at the booth.
NCC and NSS volunteers stepping in as foot soldiers.
LKG and UKG classrooms turning into vaccination centres by morning.
It's not just public health. It's community choreography.
"Every drop counts, every child is precious."
It sounds poetic. But it's actually math.
Miss one child in a slum. Miss one toddler at a railway station. Miss one infant in a migrant family.
And 15 years of hard-won progress wobbles.
India didn't just get polio-free.
India stays polio-free — one Sunday at a time, in districts like Mysuru, with armies of vaccinators most of us will never meet.
This weekend, 2.19 lakh tiny mouths will open for two drops.
And a country of 1.4 billion will quietly hold the line.
That's all for now!
