THE CORONAVIRUS ECONOMY
In 2016 when Delhi-based neurosurgeon Deepak Agrawal teamed up with robotics engineer Diwakar Vaish to set up a company to make portable ventilators in Noida, the aim was small. India needed about 6,000-8,000 additional ventilators every year and AgVa Healthcare, the company they founded, had a peak capacity of 5,000 units (though it has since then been producing around 300 units) every month.
The coronavirus pandemic outbreak earlier this year has completely changed the script. While overall mortality rate of the virus is low, in its most fatal form, it attacks lungs, which necessitates use of a ventilator. India has barely around 57,000 ventilators and the pandemic has opened up floodgates for companies like AgVa to scale up their business. Almost overnight.
“We were producing about 300 of our low-cost ventilators. Now the demand is to ramp it up to 20,000. Never in our dreams did we anticipate this,” says Vaish.
AgVa is getting help from India’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL). The Japanese firm makes close to 1.7 million cars every year and knows a thing or two about sourcing components and scaling up. “In the one-odd week that we have been together, we have been able to get domestic supplies organised along with manpower and logistics to scale up their production 30-50 times,” says R.C. Bhargava, Chairman, MSIL. We are now trying to arrange parts from China where there is a bit of a delay. Still, we should be able to manufacture about 400 ventilators a day before the end of this month.”
The threat of the pandemic spreading in India has led to a number of disparate companies joining hands or diversifying. If car companies like Maruti are helping the likes of AgVa to scale up, liquor maker Diageo or Triveni Sugar’s mills in Uttar Pradesh are producing hand sanitisers, while garment companies like Arvind have put everything aside to make masks and coveralls. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies have ramped up capacities for drugs like hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and drone manufacturers are witnessing a virtual flood of orders as authorities line up to procure them for surveillance and aerial sanitising purposes. Together, across a variety of sectors, the opportunity from the pandemic is valued upwards of ₹12,000 crore. And this is just a conservative estimate.
If the virus has, on the one hand necessitated a lockdown of the entire country and brought traditional economic activity to near-standstill, it has also created a warlike economy of its own.
Mad Rush for Ventilators
One of the biggest and most urgent opportunities for manufacturing that the pandemic has presented not only in India but across the world is for ventilators. There are no sure-shot figures available for India but estimates suggest a figure of 57,000 units.
