As the first wave of the pandemic began to take hold in India, Sanchi Jawa and her 59-year-old father, Harish Jawa, realized that they had the symptoms of a COVID-19 infection. They decided to isolate and get tested – but this was no easy task during the spring of 2020.
The father and daughter had to make multiple calls to several private labs in the capital of New Delhi before they could arrange for the gold standard in COVID-19 testing – a real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction test, or RT-PCR.
“It (RT-PCR tests) should be accessible to the common man, and everybody should be able to get it done,” Sanchi said.
Over a year later, most Indians can access PCR tests at a fraction of the cost – due to a large-scale public-private partnership, known as InDx, that set up the local know-how and infrastructure to manufacture these tests within India.
Soon after the pandemic broke out, India’s government, with funding from The Rockefeller Foundation, tasked the country’s most advanced bioscience innovation hub – the publicly funded Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, or C-CAMP – with quickly finding a way to locally produce virus test kits.
But that was not a simple task as most components of the RT-PCR test – including the mixers required to analyze samples – were not manufactured in India and had to be imported from China and South Korea, driving the price up.
More than a million tests are still being administered in the country daily, and 80% of the test kits used are now completely manufactured in India.
Manisha Bhinge, managing director of Programs and Health Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation, which pumped $3.5 million into the initiative, said she believes the increase in availability of COVID-19 tests allowed the country to implement a robust testing program that helped public health experts devise more effective policies to handle the virus outbreak.
“The scope of the crisis would’ve been significantly more, if we did not have the testing capacity in place to guide public health officials to understand how the outbreak was rolling out,” Bhinge said.
Middle and low income countries now have “more stability and security and access to affordable medical technologies,” she said.
When he first got symptoms in September 2021, his employer asked him to get a RT-PCR test. He was in luck as a government dispensary around the corner from his home in New Delhi offered the test free of charge.
“There is no way I could have paid $70 for a test,” Dabla said.
