India’s Covid vaccination drive to be hit by shutdown of syringe factories. Details here

Needles and syringes manufacturing factories in Haryana's Faridabad have been ordered to shutter operations, under the anti-pollution drive in the Delhi-NCR region. The move is likely to hamper the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination drive across the country, said a top official of a manufacturing industry.

"The shutdown 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," said Hindustan Syringes and Medical Devices Ltd (HMD) Managing Director Rajiv Nath.

The company, one of the 229 factories ordered to shut down their operations, claims to contribute over 66 per cent of syringe supplies in the country for curative healthcare and immunization.

"At this location, HMD daily produces 1.5 crore needles and 80 lakh syringes. This has come to a halt now. As we can't feed needles beyond two days buffer stock from Monday, other factories fed by the mother unit will be shut and daily 1.2 crore syringes will not be available nationally," Nath said.

Most of HMD's plants run on environmentally friendly piped natural gas (PNG), he further said.

"We have captive PNG-based power generation. We do have standby Diesel Gensets but they are hardly used since we have PNG that's far cheaper and pollution-free. We are not a polluting industry and one of our plants just got the Gold Certification for Green Building for meeting sustainability standards," he said.

Raising his concern, Rajiv Nath, who is also the Forum Coordinator of Association of Indian Medical Devices Industry, 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 healthcare crisis in curative healthcare as well for much needed COVID-19 vaccination programme.

In a letter to Arvind Kumar Nautiyal, Member Secretary of Commission for Air Quality Management, NCR, Nath informed that the firm is manufacturing COVID-19 critical medical devices, that is, syringes for COVID-19 vaccination and are running their operations with PNG of 4.3 megawatts since 2011.

Nath requested Arvind Kumar to withdraw the order or make an exception looking at the critical nature of running their operation for the COVID-19 vaccination in India as well as globally to avoid any big national healthcare crisis stating that over 2/3rd of the country depends upon HMD.

"Other countries are also counting on India to support global immunization/vaccination projects mainly for children," he wrote in his letter.

"Syringes are already running short in India and globally and the government has also put in export restrictions. Our expectation was that the export restriction will be lifted by December end as peak demand ebbed post-Diwali but orders like this will make the situation much worse" he noted.

"We definitely understand and appreciate the concerns of the government and we fully support the anti-pollution drive. We assure the government that we will not use our Diesel generator sets and have fully equipped our plants with renewable energy sources like PNG, solar power energy and direct power access feeders. We are with the government in every step to help combat the pollution level and encourage sustainability in our daily lifestyle," Nath added.

Appealing to the government to come out with a way to avert a possible crisis, Nath said, “On behalf of Indian syringe manufacturers and other critical care Medical Device makers, I appeal to the government to amend the applicability of order and help us to save the nation from a bigger looming healthcare crisis which will arise with the closure of the syringe manufacturing factories and for other critical care.”

(With ANI inputs)