TCS to Power New Government Initiative to Double India’s Covid-19 Testing Capacity through Supply Chain Solution

TCS recently announced that it has deployed a blockchain-based digital supply chain platform that powers an ambitious new project launched by the Government of India’s Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to scale up indigenous Covid-19 diagnostic test-kit production capacity to a million test kits a day.

C-CAMP’s newly launched project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, is called Indigenisation of Diagnostics (InDx), and aims to build a robust, scalable supply-chain ecosystem of Indian MSMEs capable of producing large quantities of reagents and other components needed for RT-qPCR-based and other diagnostic test kits for Covid-19. The project entails eliminating supply-chain bottlenecks, and handholding MSMEs to help them bridge capability gaps, meet necessary quality standards and expand capacities to be able to indigenously produce a million test kits a day.

As C-CAMP’s technology partner, TCS has developed and deployed a dynamic digital supply-chain platform to manage the MSME ecosystem, powered by the TCS Data Marketplace solution. The solution enables organizations to embrace new ecosystem-based business models, giving them the ability to democratize data and monetize it to create value. It facilitates standardized, controlled data exchanges across ecosystem participants with the necessary security and privacy protection, using blockchain at the back-end to ensure the immutability of audit logs, says a statement from the company.

This capability has been harnessed in the InDx project to build a supply-chain platform that aggregates test kit supply data of Tier 2 and 3 manufacturers of kits, enzymes, primers and antibodies, and provides ready visibility to Tier 1 suppliers as well as to C-CAMP on supplier-specific quality levels, capacities and inventories across the ecosystem, enabling the latter to respond to the demand for those test kits from the Government as testing programs are ramped up across the country.

“As a purpose-driven organization, we are delighted to partner with C-CAMP in this bold new initiative to scale up India’s testing capacity, and make Covid-19 testing accessible to every Indian who needs it. The TCS Data Marketplace solution is the lynchpin that anchors InDx’s supplier ecosystem of micro, small and medium enterprises, democratizing supplier data, enhancing supply-chain visibility, and driving superior outcomes for all stakeholders. The success of this initiative sets an example for how ecosystem-based partnerships can be put to work for other mission-mode programs of national importance,” said Dinanath Kholkar, global head – analytics and insights, TCS.