Jeevan: Low Cost Ventilators developed by Indian Railways

Railways develops low cost ventilator ‘Jeevan’ at Kapurthala Rail coach factory. This innovation can save thousands of lives at a time when the whole country is grappling with a shortage of medical equipment. The prototype is now awaiting ICMR permission to go for production.

Total cases in India till Monday are 4778 in which deaths are 136, total recovered cases are 382 and rest are active cases.

A ventilator is a device which helps to pump air and oxygen into the lungs and we all know that COVID-19 main symptom is breathe problem and ventilator helps to provide oxygen to the lungs.

Ravindra Gupta the General Manager of RCF said that it will cost around 10,000 without the compressor, if we get all the material, we can make 100 ventilator a day.

As per prediction India might need 1.5-2.5 lacs ventilator and we have only 57000 whose costing is very high.

The 11 member team behind ‘Jeevan’ needed to source only 2 parts, a regulator valve and a microprocessor from vendors in Delhi and Noida.

The General manager said that we have made all the tests and now we have functioning emergency ventilator, which we have manufactured at one-third cost of the ventilators in the market.

RCF has made this ventilator from the things available already in the factory. The compressor has made from air cooling machine, the body from coach components and the microprocessor has been taken from coach information system.
This device doesn’t required any moving part like servo motor or piston or link mechanism.

The machine is independently controlled and microprocessor based controlling system, and if we made some additional indicators, still the costing will not rise over Rs.30,000.

Now the question is that,Will ICMR allow for production ? How effective these ventilators should be ?

As we don’t know the answers of this questions, we can just predict and we don’t have any knowledge about how much this virus will spread in our country, because the production is fully dependent on demand.If ICMR permitting for production then we can save a lot of money from this ventilators.