A villager washes her hands before entering a village during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak in the outskirts of Agartala, India's northeast state of Tripura, March 30, 2020. (Str/Xinhua)

India's mask production capacity can hardly meet market demand as coronavirus pandemic is spreading there. Though China and other countries could offer help to increase India's production, there are multiple obstacles for the country in enhancing its prevention efforts.

Indian mask factory Orthosut Biomedical and Engineering Co was producing 100,000 surgical masks a day, but has been unable to follow up on increased demand since the end of February, despite the country banning mask exports, Manoj Rajawad, owner of the company, told the Global Times.

"Labor shortage and supplies of raw materials are our biggest problems," Rajawad said. "Currently we have 40 workers, 30 percent of our total work force. The rest cannot return to work because of the national lockdown."  

Earlier in January when the coronavirus broke out in China, India received massive orders from China for surgical masks. An Indian exporter was not optimistic about the country's capacity, "as India itself is a huge importer of surgical masks from China, Malaysia and Thailand," local newspaper the Economic Times reported.

India has a large population with a relatively prominent gap between rich and poor, said Huang Rihan, assistant dean of the College of International Relations at Huaqiao University.

Though India has greatly improved as a manufacturing power in recent years, its inability to effectively motivate production on a large scale in the short term and insufficient prevention awareness among its impoverished residents will hinder the country's epidemic prevention efforts, Huang noted.

Even for China, the so-called "the world's factory", it is not easy to produce sufficient face masks to meet the domestic market demand, Huang told the Global Times.

China's energy giant SINOPEC was able to build a melt-blown fabric plant in just 12 days, a critical component in the production of surgical masks. With all production lines put into use, overall output is expected to hit 10 billion per year.

Though China and other countries or organizations can offer to help setting up productions lines, the critical issue remains local residents' awareness in using masks, and the impoverished Indian residents' economic difficulty to buy the masks, Huang said.

Global Times