New Delhi: From remote meetings to a desperate scramble for components amid the nationwide lockdown, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur-backed Noccarc Robotics overcame many challenges to build a low-cost ventilator for Covid-19 patients during the peak of the pandemic last year.
Founded by Nikhil Kurele and Harshit Rathore, Noccarc Robotics was set up to manufacture autonomous waterless solar panel-cleaning robots.
However, upon seeing a shortage of ventilators during the pandemic, the startup undertook the project of designing a ventilator in just three months.
This journey has now been narrated in the new book The Ventilator Project — How the IIT Kanpur Consortium Built a World-class Product during India’s Covid-19 Lockdown, written by Amitabha Bandyopadhyay, professor in-charge of the IIT Kanpur incubator, Startup Incubation and Innovation Centre (SIIC), and IIT Kanpur alumnus Srikant Sastri, who were a part of the task force that assisted the project.
The book was launched virtually Tuesday in a session that was attended by the startup’s founders as well as several members of IIT Kanpur who had assisted the team.
The ventilator, which was named the Noccarc V310 ventilator, was also certified by the Directorate General Of Health Services (DGHS) — the technical wing of the health ministry.
“At present, 265 Noccarc V310 and 140 Noccarc H210 devices are deployed in forty-eight cities and sixteen states in Covid centres, defence medical colleges and hospitals,” the book notes.
“This is not just a story of innovation or product development by an IIT Kanpur startup or one about amazing teamwork. This is also a story of dedication, passion, commitment, collaboration, coordination and, above all, patience,” Abhay Karandikar, director at IIT Kanpur, wrote in the book’s forward.
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The challenges
During the launch, Bandyopadhyay talked about some of the biggest challenges the team faced when building the ventilator.
The first was the lockdown, which had halted supply chains everywhere.
“To move components from different countries to Pune was no small job,” he said.
Bandyopadhyay illustrated this with an instance from April when the team was scrambling to get a component shipped from Singapore that was going into lockdown.
The team was then aided by the Ministry of External Affairs and Invest India, a public investment promotion agency, who contacted the Singapore High Commission. The high commission figured out that the part could be sent via a Singapore Airlines flight that was coming to Mumbai to pick up stranded Singaporeans.
“But then the problem was that the banks were closed, so there was no way they could make the payment. So our High Commission stood guarantee for payment. Imagine the government working with this kind of initiative … then the sky’s the limit,” Bandyopadhyay said.
The second challenge was getting sufficient funds as multiple models had to be simultaneously made and tested given the urgency of the situation.
“We will appreciate the corporate donors of India like Axis, ICICI, Standard Chartered Bank, Infoedge and many of the others … they gave money upfront even before the product was on the ground and that allowed us to simultaneously experiment with different kinds of models,” Bandyopadhyay said.
The entire project was executed within 90 days during which time, the team only met remotely.
Sastri said that although initially the experience of working remotely was strange, the team soon became used to daily calls at noon.
“So I think two things happened, we had a great task force that came together with a diverse skill set, and they got used to seeing each other and being accountable to each other,” he said.
“That ritual of regular interaction that becomes a habit was possibly the most important thing and I think there was a higher purpose, there was a fight against Covid, it was a fight to help the country, all of these things came together and became a great model to replicate,” said Sastri.
(Edited by Rachel John)
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