As the health worker swabbed the skin on his arm with an alcohol wipe and prepared the syringe, Kartik Biswas felt an overwhelming sense of relief.

He was finally about to receive his first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, as part of a drive by the southern Indian state of Kerala to inoculate some of the country’s most marginalised people — migrant workers.

In recent weeks, officials in the southern coastal state have been taking jabs to work sites, setting up vaccination camps and putting up public health posters in local languages, urging migrant workers to get protected against the virus.

“We have a huge population of migrant workers and they should all be vaccinated. We have been getting limited doses but we are dividing what we get and holding separate vaccination camps for migrant workers,” said S. Chithra, Kerala’s labour commissioner.

“We are trying to bring about awareness that vaccines are harmless. We have posters in Assamese, Bengali, Hindi and Odia languages that we are putting out on social media,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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