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    DST’s CAWACH Initiative

    The Centre for Augmenting WAR with COVID-19 Health Crisis (CAWACH)

    Given the impact of COVID-19 globally and in India, there was an urgent need to support R&D efforts in this direction and end any further damage to the economy. During the first wave of COVID-19 in India, the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India supported the innovations offering comprehensive solutions to fight the pandemic through the startup-ecosystem.

    CAWACH supports innovations in the areas of diagnostics, devices, informatics including bio-informatics & information management systems, any intervention for the control of COVID-19 and/or startup ideas to address/mitigate various challenges faced by country / society due to the severe impact of COVID-19.


    Supported Products & Solutions

    1. High thrust products and solutions
      • High impact products based on frugal innovations that address COVID-19 challenges
      • Ventilators and PPE
        • Portable ventilators, Respirator, Resuscitator, Pulse oximeters, Oxygen concentrators and other peripheral medical equipment such as Contactless thermometers & Stethoscopes, Patient monitoring system, accessories
        • Personal Protective Equipment (Masks, Shields, Suits, Goggles, Linen and disposable gowns, gloves, lab shoes), relevant medical accessories,
      • Sterilizers and Disinfectants: Sanitizers, Disinfectants and allied systems such as Booths / Community disinfectant stations / chambers, Bio-hazardous waste management solutions, Large scale sanitization and sterilization, Surface sterilization units (preferably automated & IoT enabled)
      • Diagnostic: Rapid Antibody & Antigen diagnostic kits, Other diagnostic kits, Genomics based mapping solutions, Reagents, Safe sample collections
      • Informatics: Health care information systems, Movement tracking & tracing, Crowd management, Geofencing, Logistics, any containment solutions involving software / mobile applications, Patient tracking / monitoring systems
    2. Any solution that addresses / mitigates various challenges faced by country / society due to severe impact of COVID-19
    3. Product / solution near-ready, ready for deployment or manufacturing scaleup or repurposing of existing products and services that can be quickly deployed


    List of Startups supported during CAWACH (PDF 66Kb)

    Compendium: CAWACH Initiative – Coffee Table Book (PDF 8.3 MB)