In a relief to India’s largest syringes & needles manufacturing company Hindustan Syringes and Medical Devices Ltd (HMD) in Faridabad, Haryana, the pollution control authorities have issued permission to run the plants after they were asked to shut down operations late last week as part of a pollution control drive.
It was feared that a prolonged shut down would have impacted the supply of syringes for various vaccination programmes including the Covid-19 vaccination drive, considering that HMD contributes to almost 66 per cent of the syringe supplies in the country.
“We are thankful to CAQM (Commission for Air Quality Management in National Capital Region) for allowing us to run our plants and continuing to serve the public with much needed DispoVan disposable syringes and Kojak AD syringes. It’s a major reprieve and we appreciate the quick decision and the rationalise approach,” said Rajiv Nath, MD of HMD and forum coordinator of Association of Indian Medical Devices Industry (AiMeD).
Apart from HMD, almost 228 large factories were also asked to shut down operations. These industry units also got a reprieve now, to partially run 8 hours a da , 5 days a week on DG Sets in case of power outages.
The factories were asked to shut down ‘voluntarily’ as part of a pollution-control drive undertaken by authorities in the National Capital Region (NCR). HMD operates four manufacturing units in Faridabad, and three of these, including the main plant, were asked to be shut down.
The action was taken alleging that these facilities are running on Diesel Genset, while it had to use other energy sources like piped natural gas (PNG).
Nath said that while PNG genset is good for most of its larger plant needs but not for its smaller plants as yet where there are also space and technological constraints to switch currently. PNG is not only environment friendly but also has cost advantages at Rs. 13.90 per unit over Diesel generated power at Rs. 24 per unit. Haryana State Electricity Board’s electricity charges is Rs. 9 per unit.
While no one will want to run his plants on expensive Diesel Genset (even if they meet the emission norms with the appropriate chimney heights) that cost Rs. 24 per unit compared to Government supplied power at Rs. 9, said the industry
“We hope we are allowed to do that in very rare circumstances, going forward as is permitted for Healthcare Industry- i.e. Hospitals, to ensure optimal plant operational efficiencies as cost of change overs, machine restarts in a highly automated process leads to not only higher wastages, rejections and downtimes but with that comes a higher risk of patient safety of some manufacturing defects that should usually be rejected going to the market. It’s not always about cost economics but operational efficiencies,” said Nath.
He added that the industry hopes the Haryana Government improves its operational efficiency and cost effectiveness of delivery of power as being done in Maharashtra, Gujarat and even Madhya Pradesh. Similarly to how power is made available to farmers on priority during sowing season, regular uninterrupted high quality power should be made available to Delhi NCR region from October to February so the heavily industrialised zone need not run on backup captive power generation.
The industry is expecting another order that may allow the medical devices manufacturer to use DG set with the provisions allowed for hospitals.
At this location HMD daily produces 1.5 crore needles and 80 lakh syringes. On Saturday, the company said that it cannot feed needles beyond two days buffer stock from Monday, which may result in shutting down of other factories fed by the mother unit and daily 1.2 crore syringes will not be available nationally.
The closure of needles and syringes manufacturing factories will create disruption in the supply chain which may impact healthcare delivery across the country in general and the Covid-19 vaccination programme in particular resulting in major shortage and other related issues, it added earlier.
Nath, in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urged that syringes manufacturing facilities should be allowed to run under National Disaster Management Act to avoid National Health Care crisis in Curative Healthcare as well for much needed Covid-19 vaccination programme. |
