As garment orders have dried up, Gurugram-based apparel manufacturers have turned to personal protective equipment (PPE) manufacturing to stay in business.
As per estimation, around 25,000 PPE kits are being produced by around 21 garment manufacturers on a daily basis in the city and supplied to the Government.
According to SITRA and DRDO, some of the approved manufacturers for PPE manufacturing include Modelama Exports, Matrix Clothing, Elegant Overseas, Purple Panda, BPS Fashion and Enviro Fashion, while Sai Synergy LLP is already a known name in producing protective garments.
Tanmay Singhal, Executive (Certification & Designing), Sai Synergy LLP told Apparel Resources that the company is already into protective gear manufacturing so supplying PPE for medical industry wasn’t a challenge for them. “It’s our subject matter. We have already installed 12 seam sealing machines so technology integration was not an issue for us. However, it all depends on the order quantity and availability of raw material.”
Most of the manufacturers had infrastructure required to produce PPE kits but, unlike Sai Synergy, the challenge was seam sealing machines which they had to import. As the country needed an immediate action on PPE manufacturing to safeguard medical industry, the seam sealing machines were airlifted from Korea, Italy and Japan by these manufacturers.
“The Government had notified the manufacturers about the particular textile to be used in producing PPE kits after testing was done. Seam sealing machines’ requirement was fulfilled by importing,” commented Arvind Rai, Director, Modelama Exports which is producing around 8,000 PPE kits in its Udyog Vihar and Manesar-based plants.
Seeing the scarcity of PPE in the initial days of pandemic, the non-apparel companies like Bharat Seats and Vedanta Resources Limited too stepped up to join the fight against COVID-19 and to supply PPE kits to the Government to further distribute the same to the hospitals.
In his LinkedIn post, Anil Agarwal, Executive Chairman, Vedanta Resources Limited, stated a few days back, “In our efforts to make India self-sufficient and support the front-line workers, Vedanta has imported 23 machines that will produce 40,000 PPEs per week in collaboration with the Ministry of Textiles.” Vedanta has tied up with authorised apparel factories in Gurugram to produce around 5,000 PPE kits on a daily basis.
Gurugram-based Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) also took the issue head-on and conducted a webinar a few days back based on PPE manufacturing and technology so that the industry can be educated.
