NEW DELHI: As India scours the world for emergency acquisitions of everything from masks and goggles to testing kits and ventilators, the foreign office has become an unlikely frontline warrior against Covid-19.

In the coming weeks, India will receive about 50 ventilators from the US, 200 from Germany and about 1000 from China. Starting tomorrow, India will get about 8 million PPEs over the next seven weeks from different countries. These procurements, and others, are a consequence of Indian missions around the world calling in all their diplomatic equities to stock up the country.

On Thursday morning, Vikram Misri, India’s ambassador to Beijing confirmed that the first consignment of testing kits were on their way from China to India. “A total of 650,000 kits, including Rapid Antibody Tests and RNA Extraction Kits have been dispatched early today from Guangzhou Airport to India,” he tweeted.

China is proving to be the biggest source of a lot of materials, despite many of their equipment like PPEs failing quality tests. But there is a global shortage of these materials and the marketplace is brutal, according to some diplomats, and is nothing short of the Wild West. Even protective eye-wear is being sourced from China. “We call the ambassador, sometimes even in the middle of the night, and tell him what we need. He does the rest,” said officials involved in the massive procurement drive.

In the coming weeks India will receive over 250,000 testing kits from Korea, and altogether about 10 lakh testing kits from Korea, UK, Ireland and Malaysia — all these procurements are seeing diplomats pushing buttons to beat the clock.

Indian missions are also being called on to help procure critical components for the manufacture of ventilators in India from US, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland.

In an indication of how poor India’s manufacturing capability actually is, India has to import N-95 masks (for healthcare workers) from different countries. From this week, Zilingo, a fashion-technology startup in Singapore (run by two young Indians, Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor) will begin supplying a total of 10 million N-95 masks all the way until May-end. Both central and state governments have pitched an initial demand of close to 30 million such masks. The Indian high commission in Singapore brought the two together, meeting a crucial demand.

In addition, MEA was asked to source the components for Indian manufacturers to be able to make them here — special chemicals were sourced from Germany and machines from Sri Lanka and Hong Kong, all facilitated by Indian diplomats.

MEA also took over the licensing of exports of HCQ to different countries, after the government partially opened exports. As of this week, MEA has sanctioned HCQ tablets to about 55 countries around the world, from the US to Dominican Republic.



Facebook Twitter Linkedin Mail