On a single summer afternoon in Uttar Pradesh, another young girl walked into a government health centre and rolled up her sleeve for a shot that could save her life — one of more than 22 lakh (2.2 million) adolescent girls in that one state alone. That moment is part of a quiet milestone India just crossed: in six months, the country has administered over 80 lakh (8 million) free HPV vaccine doses to 14-year-old girls, a big step in the fight against cervical cancer.
Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women in India, but it is almost entirely preventable. HPV, short for human papillomavirus, is the infection that causes it. A single-dose vaccine, given free and voluntarily with parental consent at government facilities, blocks the virus before it can do harm. Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the National HPV Vaccination Campaign on February 28, four states — Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram — have reached 100 per cent of their target girls. Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Assam have crossed 90 per cent, with Karnataka above 85 per cent.
The numbers get even more meaningful when you see the scale of the mission. According to the Registrar General of India, about 1.2 crore (12 million) girls turn 14 every single year — that is the annual cohort the campaign hopes to reach, year after year. The shots are given by trained medical officers at health facilities linked to 24×7 care, so any rare side effect can be watched and managed quickly.
What makes this work is not just doctors. Educational sessions, community engagement and the active support of teachers, paediatricians, gynaecologists and experts from institutions like AIIMS have all helped counter misinformation. Frontline health workers — the ASHAs and ANMs who walk village to village — have been the campaign's quiet heroes, particularly in remote mountain regions like those in Assam and the northeast, where geography could easily have left girls behind. States also used context-specific approaches to reach rural, urban and hard-to-reach teenagers. A digital platform called U-WIN lets programme managers track coverage district by district, spot gaps and fix them.
India's effort rides on a huge wave of global experience: more than 800 million doses of HPV vaccine have been distributed worldwide, and 87 per cent of upper-middle-income countries, 78 per cent of lower-middle-income countries and 54 per cent of low-income countries now vaccinate as part of their national programmes. As the campaign moves into its final phase, the promise is simple and stubborn: no eligible girl left behind.