Indian ventilators to be geo-tagged to prevent misuse: Health ministry

NEW DELHI: The indigenous ly manufactured ventilators are being embedded with Global Positioning System chips to track if their locations in hospitals change as part of efforts to prevent their misuse, the Union health ministry has said. The ministry has created a dashboard for tracking the real-time status of ventilators dispatched, delivered, and installed for monitoring and feedback.

“We can track the location of each of these devices as each ventilator is geo-tagged. We will get to know in real-time if a ventilator is changing location,” said Union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan.

The government has constituted an empowered group to address issues and encourage the domestic industry to manufacture ventilators and ramp up their production.

Based on expert projections in March, the health ministry decided to procure about 60,000 ventilators for Covid-19 patients. About 18,000 ventilators have been so far supplied to states, central government hospitals, and Defence Research Development Organisation facilities. They have been installed in at least 700 hospitals across the country. Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) rolled out the first locally-made ventilator on May 30.

Officials said about 96% of the 60,000 ventilators being procured are indigenous and most of them have been sponsored by the PM CARES Fund established to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Of the 60,000 ventilators, 50,000 are being funded by PM CARES Fund which comes to about ₹2,000 crore in monetary terms,” Bhushan said at a media briefing on Tuesday.

“The Make in India [indigenous] ventilators have a share of more than 96% by volume and more than 90% by value.”