NRDC to fund 16 Covid-19 technologies for commercialisation

New Delhi: National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), an enterprise under the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Ministry of Science and Technology, has received 65 proposals from innovators under its DSIR grants-in-aid promotional programme for the development of COVID-19-related technologies for commercialisation and up-scaling. The financial support is given for the development of COVID-19 technologies in the area of tracking, testing and treatment, covering process scale-up, pilot plant studies, validation and authentication of the product, registration of the product with regulatory authorities, conducting field trials, generation of toxicology data, bridging the gap between the lab-scale development and industrial requirement so that commercial production and marketing of the product become successful.  

A three-member external technology expert committee was constituted to evaluate the proposals and they have recommended 16 projects for funding as they are technically sound and relevant. The projects funded are in the area of testing, tracing and treatment of COVID-19 and the technologies selected for support are in the area of test kits, sanitizers, ventilators, PPEs, masks and COVID hospital effluents treatment. Some of the institutions and companies selected include, IIT Delhi; Sahajanand Technologies Pvt. Ltd, Surat; IDEMI, Mumbai; INM Indian Navy, Mumbai; Omix Research & Diagnostics Laboratories, Bangalore; VBRI Innovation Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi; FFDC Kannauj, CIBART New Delhi; Rudrani Hospitality Solutions, Delhi; LN Inditech Services Pvt. Ltd., Bhubaneswar and few academic institutions and individual innovators.

NRDC's Chairman & Managing Director  (CMD) Dr H. Purushotham said that there is a huge gap in the availability of grant funds for scale-up and prototyping of innovative technologies and NRDC team quickly formulated the scheme to rise to the national emergency requirement and contribute its might to combat COVID-19. This financial support would help the innovators and startups in accelerating the technology development process and bring the innovative technologies to the market place within the next one year. He further stated that NRDC has brought out a compendium of Indian technologies for combating Covid-19 which has listed about 200 technologies developed by Indian institutions and startups and NRDC has transferred nine technologies to startups and MSMEs which are useful in combating Covid-19 in the country.

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