Covid-19: HMD supplies 471 mn syringes to govt for vaccination
New Delhi: Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd (HMD), a leading manufacturer of disposable syringes globally, has supplied 471.35 million syringes to the Government of India to help vaccinate 642.5 million people by September.
The firm supplied more syringes than it had committed, 442.5 million, according to a company statement on Friday. The government has placed a fresh order for a supply of 132.5 million syringes.
“India’s vaccination drive has been a role model for the world,” said Rajiv Nath, Managing Director of HMD.
“To ensure there is no shortage of syringes, HMD has preponed the supply commitments to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. HMD has further diverted the supply of 100 million pieces from UNICEF order to the GoI from September to December. Spike in demand for Non-Covid healthcare has also posed challenges for vaccination syringes” he said.
In August, HMD had achieved a production capacity of over one billion auto-disable (AD) syringes for Covid vaccination per year, helping make India Atma Nirbhar in syringe manufacturing. At present, it is producing more than 4.2 lakh syringes of various types per hour at its factories spread over 11 acres in Faridabad industrial district in Haryana, he said.
“Amidst the alarming Covid-19 situation, our manufacturing plants were operational 24/7 and acted as a backbone to the Indian healthcare sector and the frontline workers. In April 2020 itself, we started to rapidly ramp up HMD’s capacity and re-engineered the standard disposables syringes lines to manufacture in their place AD syringe for vaccination. HMD initiated in May an investment of over USD 15 million (nearly Rs. 100 crores) from their own resources to mass-produce specialty syringes even before purchase orders were even in sight.”
From 500 million pieces per annum capacity in June 2020, the company increased its production rate to 800 million per annum in May 2021, and now it is producing one billion (100 crores) AD syringes. By March 2022, it plans to increase its capacity to 1.25 billion. HMD has also scaled assorted syringes production to three billion.
(VP)
