Mumbai, April 15, 2020: ICICI Securities, India’s leading retail-led equity franchise today said, as a part of its CSR initiatives, it has joined hands with the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur as a ‘Technology Development Partner’, to develop indigenized, high-end yet affordable invasive ventilators.
The ventilators are essential life saving devices that are critical for COVID-19 affected patients. It becomes critical for a country like India to start designing and manufacturing completely indigenized and low-cost invasive ventilators. To achieve this, the country must encourage Indian innovators to come to the fore, especially nimble-footed start-ups.
IIT-Kanpur, along with Nocca Robotics (a start-up incubated at Start-up Incubation and Innovation Centre IIT Kanpur – SIIC IIT Kanpur), has created a consortium with bio-medical engineers, doctors, R & D leaders, supply chain, MedTech business heads, etc., to develop a completely indigenized, invasive, portable and affordable mechanical ventilator. Under this fast-track project, by mid-May 2020, the product will be ready for market, post design, development and testing of prototypes at multiple centres.
“Covid-19 has created a pandemic and has affected the entire ecosystem. While the research work on diagnosis and cure are being done, the immediate need is ensuring affordable and low-cost life saving devices. At ICICI Securities, healthcare is one important area that we focus on CSR. We are happy to partner with IIT Kanpur, as part of our CSR initiative, in the R&D and testing of prototypes of indigenized, portable affordable and invasive ventilators. The project team has some of the brightest technical minds and they have set for themselves a very tight deadline so that the nation at large is benefitted. We are hopeful that the project meets the expectations of price and functionality,” said Mr. Vijay Chandok, MD & CEO, ICICI Securities.
“At IIT Kanpur, we are doing our bit towards global efforts on fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. We learnt that ventilators will be in short supply as the number of affected patients rise and our team rose to the challenge by taking on themselves the responsibility to design ground-up an affordable yet fully functional ventilator. We are happy to partner with ICICI Securities as a Technology Development Partner to bring this project to light,” said Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director of IIT Kanpur.
Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)
