Mysuru-based firm in spotlight as India looks for ventilators
BENGALURU: Experts believe that when the Covid-19 pandemic enters the third stage of community transmission, medical infrastructure, especially the number of ventilators a country has, will make all the difference.
Several European and Asian countries have already banned the export of ventilators — a decision that India also took last week. In India, one of the few domestic manufacturers of ventilators is Mysore-based Skanray Technologies. The firm manufactures an array of 45 different products across areas such as radiology, cardiology, respiratory, and diathermy.
Skanray could thus play a key role in supplying enough ventilators to ensure patients infected by Sars-cov-2 can be treated.
Vishwaprasad Alva, founder and Managing Director of Skanray has been a vocal advocate of India building manufacturing expertise in complex electronic goods needed in medium to low volume — having lost out on electronic mass manufacturing to countries such as China, Japan and Taiwan. “While I don’t want to sound sceptical, fact is attention of the government and media to this sector comes only when there is an emergency, which is unfortunate. However domestic EMS (electronic manufacturing services) companies have survived despite a hostile environment,” he said. Skanray, which has been operational for the past eight years has four manufacturing units. Apart from the Mysuru plant it has two manufacturing units in Italy and one in Brazil.
A ventilator costs anywhere between ₹5lakh and ₹12 lakh. He admits that several critical components are imported, and that supply has stopped because European countries supplying them have stopped exporting in order to cater to their own needs.
Skanray currently has the ability to produce 200 ventilators a month at its Mysuru facility. “We need a bit of handholding in ensuring supply of some of the critical components that can be manufactured domestically. This can be done in India with DRDO’S help...second, we need firm orders in hand. Third we would need to redeploy our resources away from non-critical products to those which are needed on an urgent basis,” says Alva.