150 ventilators under PM-Cares fund arrive at Delhi centre, all functioning
Since the outbreak of the pandemic in April 2020, the Centre has been procuring medical devices including ventilators, which have been distributed among states and Union territories.
Around 150 GPS-enabled ventilators provided under the PM Cares Trust Fund have started functioning at Delhi's Sardar Patel Covid Centre. The Covid care centre, run by the Delhi government and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, started its operation on April 26, as the Capital witnessed the peak of the second wave of the pandemic.
All these ventilators that arrived at Delhi's Sardar Patel Covid Centre are GPS-enabled.
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The request for 150 ventilators on a loan basis for a period of six months for the critical patients at the Covid care centre was raised by ITBP DG, SS Deswal.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic in April 2020, the Centre has been procuring medical devices including ventilators, which have been distributed among states and Union territories.
The ventilators at Delhi's Covid care centre are all functional.The request for these ventilators was made by ITBP DG, SS Deswal for critical patients at the centre. Recently, some states claimed ventilators procured by the Centre have been found faulty.
Amid reports of ventilators procured by the Centre not working properly, the Centre has recently clarified that when the pandemic began last year, ventilators were available in a very limited number in government hospitals.
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"Very limited manufacturing of ventilators was taking place in the country and most of the suppliers abroad were not in a position to make supplies of ventilators in large quantities to India. That is when the local manufacturers were encouraged to produce “Make in India" Ventilators to address the huge projected demand of the country and orders placed on them. Many of them were first time manufacturers of the ventilators," the Centre said in a statement.
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"Very limited manufacturing of ventilators was taking place in the country and most of the suppliers abroad were not in a position to make supplies of ventilators in large quantities to India. That is when the local manufacturers were encouraged to produce “Make in India" Ventilators to address the huge projected demand of the country and orders placed on them. Many of them were first time manufacturers of the ventilators," the Centre said in a statement.
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The Centre also clarified that detailed instructions and guidelines have been issued to all ventilator users regarding proper usage and maintenance of the ventilators.
On May 9, the Union health ministry wrote to states and Union territories informing them about the helpline numbers of the manufacturers. State-wise WhatsApp groups have also been created with nodal officers of the states concerned, the representative of the hospitals and technical teams of the manufacturers so that they can coordinate if any technical issue is faced.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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