E-Paper
Agra-based company bags license for manufacturing NavRakshak PPEs, targets one million units a year
The demands for PPEs is high globally given the unabated rise of coronavirus disease.
An Agra-based apparel manufacturing firm named the Indian Garment Company has bagged the license to produce a special kind of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) suits and plans to ramp up production to dole out about a million units in year to keep up with the demand for the protective gear used widely by the personnel of essential services across the world, who are deployed at the forefront of coronavirus containment efforts.
These PPE suits are named NavRakshak and are principally designed by a naval Doctor Dr Arnab Ghosh, who has used his personal experience of using PPEs to ensure maximum comfort and protection for the doctors, who would possibly be amongst the personnel wearing them.
Indian Garment Company is registered with the government as a micro enterprise under the MSME Act and has been manufacturing PPE kits that have been supplied to various hospitals. After winning the license, the company has proposed an annual production target of over one million NavRakshak PPE kits.
Watch: Rise in India’s Covid cases not as high as other countries’: AIIMS director
The award of license was done through National Research Development Cooperation (NRDC), which has signed a technology licensing agreement for the manufacturing know-how of the NavRakshak suit with the company.
The special suit incorporates superior quality breathable fabric and its design innovation is said to eliminate the need for costly taping and sealing of the seam which is otherwise needed in other PPEs currently available in the market. The fabric, suit and seam have been found to meet the synthetic blood penetration resistance criteria comfortably.
The prototype development took place earlier at the Naval Dockyard, Mumbai, and it was tested and certified at the Institute of Nuclear Medicine & Allied Sciences (INMAS), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), an accredited lab authorized by the Ministry of Textile for PPE prototype sample testing as per the prevailing ISO standards and guidelines of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Ministry of Textile.
