Over 168 million children across the country were administered polio drops Sunday - including by Congress president Sonia Gandhi - as India enters the final lap of the race to rid itself of the crippling disease.

Armed with around 170 million doses of polio vaccine, over 100,000 volunteers and government officials vaccinated children under the age of five in a bid to make the country polio-free by 2005.

Gandhi, in her capacity as chairperson of the National Advisory Council on major policy issues, including health, gave polio drops to infants at her 10, Janpath residence. It was her way of demonstrating the importance the governing coalition was giving to health issues.

Sunday was the fourth and last of the anti-polio immunization drives and is known as Pulse Polio Day.

India is one of six countries - from among the 125 affected countries 14 years ago - which still reports polio cases. The others are Nigeria, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt.

Worldwide, the count has already been reduced from a staggering 350,000 cases in 1988 to a mere 784 in 2003. If polio is eradicated by 2005 as targeted, it will become the first disease to be wiped from the earth in the 21st century.

Volunteers all over the country tightened their anti-polio drive - setting up camps in all the districts and going from door-to-door in the most remote villages - to ensure that the vital medicine reaches children.

"Especially now, we cannot afford to slip," said Deepak Kapoor, chairman of the Rotary International in India. Rotary International has spent over $500 million for the vaccination drive around the world.

"Many parts of the country have already become polio-free, and if we are intensive enough, we can definitely eradicate the disease soon."

Pulse Polio Days would now be held in selected states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in January and February next year and there would be national campaigns in April and May, officials said.

This year, India reported 85 cases of polio, the lowest count ever in the country. Of these, 58 were reported from Uttar Pradesh and 20 from Bihar. The other cases were reported from Maharashtra, West Bengal, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Delhi.

"Western Uttar Pradesh and northern Bihar are the polio hotspots in the country, and we would be taking extra efforts in these regions," Kapoor told IANS.

In the past 14 years, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative fostered one of the largest public-private partnerships between the affected governments, the World Health Organisation, Rotary International, the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the Unicef, to eradicate polio.

Over $3 billion has been spent in immunising more than two billion children.

In India, the first National Immunization Day was first held in 1994. In 2002, the country recorded 1,600 cases - a marked drop from the 1994 figure of 4,791.

Last year, India recorded just 225 cases - the first time it did not have the dubious distinction of having the largest number of polio cases in the world. It was second to Nigeria, which had 355 cases.

"If polio can be completely wiped off by next year, it would be a great victory, not just for India, but for the international community as a whole. It would induce a renewed confidence in our efforts against other diseases such as malaria and AIDS," Kapoor said.

--Indo-Asian News Service