'India needs to firm up quality control, improve R&D to become global hub for PPE kits'

India needs to strengthen quality control and step up R&D efforts to realise its potential of becoming a global manufacturing hub for PPE kits, said a report released on Thursday.

India needs to strengthen quality control and step up R&D efforts to realise its potential of becoming a global manufacturing hub for PPE kits, said a report released on Thursday.  "It will bring more consistency into the quality of the PPEs manufactured, reduce the testing and rejection overheads post-delivery and allow local manufacturers to scale up their production to reach not only domestic markets but also global markets," said the report by the Institute for Competitiveness. It points out that even though India achieved self-sufficiency in terms of localised manufacturers and production of PPE body coveralls, PPE fabric and seam tapes, the country still relied on imports for procuring a critical component like seam sealing equipment.

India needs to indigenize the production of critical equipment and machineries for essential medical supplies in order to have complete control over the end-to-end manufacturing value chain and to become a fully capable manufacturer of highest quality PPE kits and other essential medical supplies, the report suggested.  “We need to shift our mindsets from focusing on cost to ensuring world-class quality, if we, as a nation want to be known as high-quality manufacturer with economical costing rather than a cheap quality nation with low costing,” Amit Kapoor, Chair, Institute of Competitiveness said. He said there is still more room for improvement in the quality of locally-manufactured PPE kits.  "Hence, India needs to step up the R&D efforts to improve the quality further. It will also enhance the competitiveness of the indigenous PPE industry in the global market in the near future,” said Kapoor.

The Ministry of Textiles had launched “Operation PPE Coverall” in late March 2020 to scale up the initiative.  According to the report, a cluster-based approach was adopted to develop the local capabilities for manufacturing PPE kits.  The Ministry facilitated the development of PPE manufacturers in small and medium clusters across different parts of India to speed up the process, it said.  By May, India had developed an indigenous network of PPE fabric and garment manufacturers having the necessary processes, capability and capacity of manufacturing 4.5 lakh pieces of body coveralls and N-95 masks per day.  By July, the country's indigenous supply of PPE kits had exceeded the domestic demand and it exported 23,00,000 personal protection equipment (PPE) to the US, the UK, Senegal, Slovenia, and UAE, the report said.  India was thus able to transform from an importer country to a self-sufficient one and later an exporter country in PPE kits. The Institute for Competitiveness is the Indian knot in the global network of Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School.