Dev 360 | A quality challenge for Atma Nirbhar Bharat

In the time of war or a pandemic, each country looks out for its own first. This week, the Directorate-General of Foreign Trade issued a notification which said that the government had not found any applications from July 1 to 3 seeking to export PPE medical coveralls meeting the necessary criteria, and “all applications therefore have been found ineligible for allocation of export quota.” Last month, the government had decided to shift the export of PPEs from the “prohibited” to “restricted” category, with a permissible limit of 50 lakh kits. Several health professionals I spoke to said while it was very creditable that India had managed to shed its import dependence on protective wear and certain medical products in barely two months, the mad rush to step up production had opened the floodgates to many fly-by-night operators who had skipped all quality norms. The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation has not defined any classification of PPE components intended for medical use, says Dr Sanjeev Relhan, chairman of the Preventive Wear Manufacturers Association of India. “The market for personal protective equipment is dominated by a lack of transparency about what is being produced and where, its quality, the amount in stock, and how they are allocated,” said MSF’s Thierry Allafort-Duverger.