how world-class ventilator was designed & built in IIT-Kanpur during lockdown released
According to IIT officials, the book is a gripping testament to the sheer will & collaborative efforts of two brilliant Indians, who came together to build a world-class ventilator in just three months when pandemic struck to country. Abhay Karandikar Director Indian institute of technology Kanpur (IITK) who penned the foreword for the book said, “It was a flash of pride for us”.
The Ventilator Project, a book that tells the story of how the ventilator was designed & built at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur during the corona virus-triggered lockdown book was officially launched now. According to IIT officials, This book is a is a gripping testament to the sheer will & it was a collaborative efforts of two brilliant Indians, who came together to build a worldclass ventilator in just three months when the pandemic struck the country.
Nikhil Kurele & Harshit Rathore founders of Nocca Robotics, an IIT Kanpur-incubated company to manufacture autonomous waterless solar panel-cleaning robots. When the pandemic struck & patients were dying due to a shortage of ventilators, they designed, developed & manufactured a scalable world-class ventilator in just three months.
Nikhil Kurele & Harshit Rathore had never seen a ventilator, let alone building one. But they did not let this stop them. “The clock was ticking & hundreds of lives were at stake. Despite the odds, the duo met over daily Zoom calls & exchanged WhatsApp messages to overcome the lockdown restrictions & work on the ventilator. Their story is now captured within the thrilling pages of the book, ‘The Ventilator Project – How the IIT Kanpur Consortium Built this Product during India’s Covid-19 Lockdown’ by authors Srikant Sastri & Amitabha Bandyopadhyay,” a senior IIT official said.
Terming it an “unseen case study of an aatmanirbhar Bharat’ , Koppillil Radhakrishnan, former chairman of the ISRO, said, “With regards to health security, eighty percent of medical equipment is imported in India. IIT Kanpur has successfully managed to develop a reliable, safe & good quality indigenous product that helped save lives, equally trusted by both academicians & health practitioners. The Ventilator Project is not only a case study for entrepreneurs or the startup ecosystem of India, but also for our premier educational institutions & the critical role they will need to play within the aatmanirbhar movement whilst strengthening our economy.”
The duo collaborated with & called upon 20 industry veterans with unmatched experience from the domains of academia, policy-making, medicine & manufacturing. Driven by their extraordinary zeal & technical brilliance, the two young enterprising & innovative minds worked with these industry veterans to achieve their goal of ventilator designed, developed & built in India that’s like the simplest within the world.
Abhay Karandikar, Director, IIT Kanpur, who penned the foreword for the book, said, “It was a flash of pride for us when, within the middle of a national lockdown, the two young innovators told us that they wanted to develop a posh equipment that’s otherwise imported. We knew this was a project that deserved all possible support. The Ventilator Project is one such example that puts IIT Kanpur and India on the map of worldwide innovation in both manufacturing and business.”
