Startups continue to face red tape, govt tendering process is corrupt, says Skanray founder

Vasudha Zora | NT

Bengaluru: Make in India may be the buzzword of the Narendra Modi government and its policy makers, but Vishwaprasad Alva, Founder and Managing Director of Skanray, began his entrepreneurial journey much before that in 2007 and now his company has a global footprint in the medical devices segment. In a chat with News Trail, Alva talks about the challenges he faced in setting up and running Skanray.

What made you follow the make in India concept?

We set up our research and product development centre at Mysuru in 2007-8 with a five-member team and took it to 130 professionals by 2011-12 when we launched commercial operations. Make in India was not a popular slogan then, nor did we work around “Make in India '' as our goal.

We are a set of product design and R&D people with global experience from MNCs who wanted to make advanced diagnostic imaging and critical care products for the global market with international certifications. Knowing well that the public tendering process in India is very corrupt and not easy for startups, we focused on the private sector and exports.

We quickly set up facilities in Europe, US and worked with Brazil, Mexico, China teams to be a global company by design. We didn’t want to be a trader or distributor. India has its natural advantage with R&D and manufacturing costs that we leveraged. We had skill gaps that we made good through our R&D facilities in Europe.

How challenging was Covid-19 disruption and Skanray's contribution to a healthy India?

Skanray is a multiproduct medical technology company. Ventilator is just one of the 50 products it has. There are 34 FDA approved and 48 CE marked products spread across 80 countries through OEM partners and own brand sales. Skanray has been making advanced ICU ventilators since 2014.

Looking for domestic technology and manufacturing was never a priority for the Government, nor did we trust the government to be fair to Indian manufacturers in their corrupt tendering process. Over the years, we saw the Centre working on reforms, digitization and transparency in public procurement, while the state government including our own state Karnataka getting more opaque and corrupt in procurement.

We were selling these advanced ICU ventilators to the private sector and for the export market, while our state and central government was busy importing them from reputed and shady overseas vendors. When the pandemic struck , the demand for ventilators shot up, the prices skyrocketed and there was acute shortage.

The countries that produce them (about eight countries out of the 190 countries around the world) needed whatever they produced to themselves and to their neighbours and developed countries that gave them higher prices.

The Indian Government was forced to look for domestic players and Skanray was the only Advanced ICU ventilator manufacturer in the country with CE certificate and exporting its products. So the next thing they did was to ban exports and ask us to make large volumes for the domestic market.

The Niti Ayog, the GOI MEA, Commerce ministry got into action and helped us to produce the large volumes in record time getting support from PSUs and DRDO. The delivery of these large numbers is surely something that was a world record, thanks to the DRDO, BEL, Mahindra help in providing manufacturing space and resources.

This was an opportunity for us to showcase the power of the partnership of the government, private sector and the DRDO teams at times of crisis. During happy days, these partnerships have never worked because of the long processing, red tape and bureaucracy .The GOI’s role is something that needs special mention.

Where does Skanray have its presence in the world?

Skanray has two facilities at Mysore in India, two units in Bologna Italy. Its AED business is based in Amsterdam, a unit in Michigan in the US and projects in progress in Brazil, Mexico and China. Skanray is an OEM to some of the best brands in the world designing and manufacturing products for MNCs.

What are your future plans?

The market is huge, players are few and the world is wide open. We now have over 700 professionals, 50 products, global manufacturing sites functioning and in progress . Skanray should be a formidable player in the market in near future.