Coronavirus: Improvisation the mantra for boosting protective gear supply

India is in dire need of protective gear for its health care professionals, caregivers, personnel working in essential services apart from the common person who is also wearing protection

A nanotechnology start-up that makes ‘smart clothing’ is now making protective masks. A Baddi-based topical ointment maker, Marine Lifesciences, is also making sanitizers at its plant now. 

As Covid-19 outbreak spreads, India is in dire need of protective gear for its health care professionals, apart from the common man. In a country of 1.3 billion, the demand is huge. India has enough installed capacity, and at normal times, most of it is lying idle. But given the unforeseen demand, the industry and government are working round the clock to ensure industrial units that can improvise to make protective gear do so. The government is even trying to work with small bag-making units to make masks.

Several small units, even shopping bag makers, that have mushroomed are making sub-standard masks. The government is trying to work with them to improvise their machines so that they can switch to making proper masks, a senior government official said. 

Rajiv Nath, forum coordinator of the Association of Indian Medical Device Industry (AiMeD), said the industry has requested the government to depute some engineers from their technology centres to help these micro and small scale units to redesign their machinery.

India’s sugar producing hub Uttar Pradesh (UP) stepped in saying sugar mills will divert their ethyl alcohol production to the sanitizer industry. Sugar mills in UP alone make 1.4 billion litres of ethyl alcohol or ethanol per annum. This is supplied to public sector oil-marketing companies to mix with petrol.

An umbrella body of medical device makers said several distilleries in the country have offered help. Many units in Rampur (UP) and some in southern parts of India are supplying pre-formulated ethyl alcohol-based products to sanitizer units, he said.

S K Garg, MD of Marine Lifesciences, however, said the lockdown has hit raw material supplies hard. Isopropyl alcohol is primarily used to make sanitizers, but prices have shot up. With a price cap now on the finished product, it has become unviable to procure at the current rates. Ethyl alcohol availability is still low, he claimed.

The demand rise happened in mid-March. We were selling as usual when the Covid-19 panic broke out around March 7. By March 17, 100 per cent of our inventory vanished, said Virender Dhar, chief marketing officer, of Eurolife Healthcare, which sells surgical and hygiene hand disinfectant Germkill.

Apart from Johnson & Johnson, Microgen, Raman & Weil, and Schülke are some of the major hand sanitizer producers in the country. The rest of the market is fragmented. While there was black marketing, state drug regulators have clamped down on them.

Protective masks, too, have seen a shortage. Public sector undertaking HLL Lifecare has rolled out a tender for emergency procurement of 4 million N95 masks (with valves), 2 million pairs of nitrile gloves, 20 million surgical masks, 1 million units of 500 ml pack sanitizers, among other items, a few days back. 

The government came under sharp criticism after it supplied 90 tonnes of protective gear to Serbia amid a shortage back home. It has since banned exports of such items. The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority has also capped prices of protective gear.

According to the data submitted by manufacturers recently to the government, the country has the  capacity to make 308 million masks per annum. Of this, the current spare capacity is around 59 million masks. India was earlier exporting around 218 million masks.

Trouble brewed after people started buying protective gear for personal use. Imagine, if each of the 850,000 chemist outlets requisitioned for a 50-mask stock. The numbers would be huge, explained Nath. Many corporate houses, too, bought in bulk.

Given the shortage, government hospitals are reaching out to manufacturers directly. Suman Ratnam, managing director of Gujarat Medical Services Corporation, the nodal agency for supply of kits, said the government is trying to decentralise procurement.

Textile conglomerate Arvind has also jumped on the bandwagon by making bodysuits or coveralls. “We are making 2,000-3,000 bodysuits a day. This will go up to 10,000 per day in a week or two,” Punit Lalbhai, executive director, Arvind, told Business Standard.

Welspun Group is also switching capacities at its textiles plants to make disinfectant wipes and masks. “The company is working on building a pipeline of a few 100,000 masks and wipes in the coming weeks,” B K Goenka, chairman of Welspun Group, said.