Ventilator shortage: 'Make in India' devices not picked up by govt

Many facilities stopped production because govt did not procure the ventilators it had ordered last year

As India battles the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, several state governments are grappling with a shortage of ventilators, primarily because  domestic manufacturing and supply of ventilators dwindled after the initial push by the Centre last year.

With hospitals unwilling to take ‘Made in India’ ventilators, the government curtailed the requirement it had originally envisaged in 2020. And as orders from the government dried up, manufacturers, too, stopped production.

When the pandemic first hit last year, and exposed the country’s lack of medical preparedness, the central government stepped in to order ventilators in bulk from home-grown manufacturers. 

In a press briefing on 9 April 2020, the ministry of health and family welfare said orders had been placed for procuring 50,000 Critical Care Ventilators (CCV). By June, Rs 2,000 crore was allocated for supplying ‘Made in India’ ventilators to government-run Covid-19 hospitals across the country through the PM Cares Fund. 

While 30,000 ventilators were being manufactured by Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), the balance 20,000 were to be produced by AgVa Healthcare (10,000), AMTZ Basic (5,650), AMTZ High End (4,000) and Allied Medical (350).

However, according to government data reviewed by Business Standard, the Centre procured only 35,179 ventilators out of the 50,000 originally ordered. AgVa Healthcare, the Noida-based manufacturer had tied up with India’s largest carmaker, Maruti Suzuki, to build 10,000 ventilators. But though it has manufactured all 10,000 CCVs, the government picked up only half the order. This led AgVa-Maruti to stop production in June last year.

Maruti Suzuki chairman RC Bhargava told a television channel on Tuesday that the government did not procure all the ventilators that it had ordered. These include the ones manufactured by Maruti in collaboration with AgVA Healthcare.

According to industry sources, though AgVa made the ventilators in record time, by May 2020, even after a year, the government is yet to pick up half of this order. As many as 5,000 ventilators are still sitting in AgVa’s warehouses.

However, sources also said that multiple hospitals had raised concerns about the quality of AgVa’s ventilators. According to a Huffington Post India news report last year, a government panel had said that AgVa’s Covid-model ventilators “should not be considered as a replacement for high-end ventilators in tertiary care ICUs”.

AgVa was also looking for a tie-up with state-owned manufacturing giant BHEL to ramp up ventilator production. However, this did not materialise. BHEL in June last year was also set to manufacture 5,000 CCVs. In April 2020, it issued a tender looking for strategic partners for utilising its facilities for manufacturing, assembly and testing of its approved CCV in April. This plan, too, fell through.

Nalin Shingal, chairman and managing director, BHEL, said, “We have not manufactured any ventilator, we do not have the manufacturing capacity for it. We tried to look for but did not find a partner.” 

Similarly, the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) also invited for expression of interest (EOI) and said it was exploring the possibility of collaborating with established ventilator manufacturers. But this does not seem to have gathered steam, too.

However, not every company faced hurdles. Noccarc Robotics started manufacturing ventilators last year. With Covid-19 cases going up again, the company has been inundated with calls for supplying ventilators from states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bihar and Delhi. 

“In the last 20 days, we have dispatched 200 units and we have pending orders of 1000-1200 units. In the last few days, requests for ventilators have surged to 3,000-3,500. The requests have come from both government and private hospitals,” said Harshit Rathore, co-founder and CTO, Noccarc Robotics.

Looking at the demand and the desperate situation, the company is also ramping up its production capacity. Currently, it can produce 50 units per shift per day. “If we double the shift then we can ramp up our production to 90 units and that is what we plan to do,” Rathore added.

When asked about the demand for ventilators when Covid cases were declining,  Rathore said that some of the smaller hospitals which started creating ICU facilities had approached them for ventilator systems. “Last fiscal our total output was 600-700 units and close to 50 per cent of the demand was from small hospitals in tier 2 and 3 cities,” he said. 

Hyundai, too, had tied up with Air Liquide Medical Systems in April last year to manufacture 1,000 ventilators in the first phase. While it had plans to scale up, due to lack of orders it did not do so. “We supplied all the 1,000 equipment to the Tamil Nadu government, and the machines are working fine but there were no further orders. Hence, we stopped production at the Chennai plant,” said an executive of the company.

Indian Railways also tried its luck with manufacturing ventilators. In April 2020, the Railways developed a low-cost ventilator called Jeevan at its Kapurthala Rail Coach Factory (RCF). It was to cost Rs 10,000 without the compressor and the RCF had the capacity to make 100 such ventilators per day. But the project never took off due to the unavailability of parts.

“The situation had evolved a lot since April 2020 and many domestic players had come up. There seemed to be no takers for the low-cost ventilator that was developed,” a Railways official told Business Standard. 

Rathore of Noccarc Robotics, too, flagged component supply constraints. Some of the components come from the US, China, Taiwan and Netherlands. “Last year, some countries stopped supplying components due to their focus on domestic needs. We are hoping that does not happen this time,” said Rathore.