A call from their alma mater, when the nation is confronting an intense deficiency of ventilators for Covid-19 patients, brought Harshit Rathore and Nikhil Kurele into assembling ventilators.
Rathore and Kurele are graduated class of IIT-Kanpur, where their organization, Nocca Robotics, was brooded in 2017. “It was a phone call from our professor Amitabha Bandopadhyay in March that turned things around and we ventured into making medical devices, first with a simple ventilator and more recently, a High Flow Oxygen Therapy Device,” said Rathore, prime supporter of the Pune-based organization, which is among five Indian organizations to have packed away help from the Center for Augmenting WAR with Covid-19 Heath Crisis (CAWACH) program.
With the cross country lockdown driving every one of their workers to stay home alongside insufficient flexibly of crude materials, the difficulties before the group were many. Be that as it may, with plan and endorsement uphold from IIT-Kanpur just as a Rs 1 crore award gave by the Department of Science and Technology, the work before long assembled pace.
“We managed to locate local vendors for materials and our prototype was developed in a day. A basic version was readied by mid-May. After rigorous testing in hospitals and laboratories, checking with doctors, the ventilator V310 was commercialised and made available in the market in July,” said Rathore.
Pitched at an expense of Rs 3.5 lakh, more than 400 units are now introduced in government and private medical clinics in excess of 50 urban areas, including Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru.
“We plan to develop more medical devices as many of them are currently imported. India needs more devices that are developed and manufactured here,” said Rathore.
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