AIMED worked closely with the Government and Manufacturers to ramp up medical equipment production

Representative image by Klaus Hausmann from Pixabay

As India geared up to fight the COVID-19 crisis, the Association of Indian Medical Device Industry relentlessly worked at the forefront to combat the crisis. Rajiv Nath, Forum Coordinator, AiMED on behalf of the Indian Medical Device industry was in regular consultation with the Govt & assured Commerce Minister, Shri Piyush Goyal & Govt. full support to the Govt’s spirited fight against COVID-19 crisis. Huge efforts were put into increase medical device manufacturing capacity by AiMeD through its Members and beyond by reaching out to Garment Manufacturers, Automakers, Auto Component Manufacturers and Electronic Component Manufacturers as preparedness for possible unprecedented, unpredictable demands.

Rajiv Nath recognized that the government interventions under the able leadership of Cabinet Secretary, Shri Rajiv Gauba and DOP Secretary, Dr. P D Vaghela helped the Medical Devices industry scale up production during the pandemic. AiMeD worked closely with Govt. of India and manufacturers for ramping up capacity and addressing production in this National Emergency to fight against COVID-19 pandemic, during the complete lockdown period.

The Government of India through its flagship ‘Make in India’ initiative relied heavily on the Indian manufacturers to meet the rising demand of essential healthcare equipment’s for the country, pushing the Indian medical devices sector to become self-reliant especially for the essential 39 COVID Medical Devices. AiMeD worked with QCI to expedite finalization of ICMED Plus Certification as well as with Consultants Consortium to provide online training on Quality Management System Certification to new entrepreneurs from Automakers, Garments, Textile, Auto parts Industry who had ventured into Medical Devices manufacturing to build capacity & capabilities to meet QCIs ICMED Certification and Regulatory Compliance so that they could have the confidence to seek Global Certification of CE and US FDA Compliance for enabling Global Competitiveness. 4 batches of over 115 Manufacturers or their representatives were intensely trained over 7 modules over 11 sessions spread over 2 weeks in April &May 2020.

Before the outbreak of COVID-19, only 20 firms were manufacturing 62 lacs PPE kits per year but within, two-three months, the number of manufacturers listed with AiMeD increased to 140 with 25.55 Crore annual capacity.

Similarly, the number of Indian firms manufacturing, ventilator manufacturers went up from 8 to 17, mask manufacturers from 30 to 108, swab manufacturers from zero to five and sanitizer manufacturers from 35 to 49 and RT PCR Kit manufacturer from 0 to 8.

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