Coronavirus | Medical devices association eyes production of 50,000 ventilators a month by May

This can be possible with companies like Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra & Mahindra committing support to help scale up production, it says

Need of the hour: There is a huge disparity in the availability of ventilators across the country.

The Association of Indian Medical Device Industry (AiMed) is targeting to produce 50,000 ventilators per month by May, particularly with companies like Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra & Mahindra committing support to help scale up production of medical devices.

“Huge efforts are being put to increase medical device manufacturing capacity by the manufacturers ... big companies like Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra & Mahindra, Kalyaani, Tata Motors, Hyundai etc. will possibly offer to collaborate with our members to rapidly scale up production of ventilators. The aim is to produce 50,000 ventilators per month by May,” Rajiv Nath, Forum Coordinator at AiMeD, said.

Huge disparity

The press statement issued by the association noted that as per a Brookings report, the country might need anywhere between 1,10,000 - 2,20,000 ventilators by May 15 in the worst-case scenario and the number of ventilators available today in the country is about 57,000. “There is a pressing need of ventilators in India and a huge disparity in their availability in various States. For instance, Mumbai has 800 to 1,000 ventilators, while States such as Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh have 1,500 and 1,800, respectively. Bengaluru has approximately 400 ventilators, whereas Kerala has 5,000,” as per the statement.

AiMeD said seven of its ten major manufacturers have confirmed that the current production capacity of ventilators is 5,500-5,750 pieces per month, compared with production of about 2,700 units in the previous month.

Consortium set up

SkanRay, the leading ventilator manufacturer, has created a consortium with BEL, BHEL and Mahindra & Mahindra to ramp up production from 2,000 units per month to 5,000 units per month, and to 30,000 pieces per month by May. Likewise, AgVa Healthcare has tied up with Maruti Suzuki to scale up production from 400 units per month to 4,000 units in April and 10,000 units per month by May.

Others are similarly gearing up to address the challenge, the association added. “For masks, the manufacturing capacity of the 20 manufacturers in AiMeD’s list is over 25 million/month. Usually it’s excessive capacity, so many manufacturers export their surplus but now demand has spiked and the government has banned exports ... There may be other manufacturers beyond this list as well. As on date, the market has probably expanded to over 40 million pieces per month,” the statement added.