Maruti's joint venture for seat manufacturing starts donating one million masks

Maruti Suzuki joint venture Krishna Maruti has started donating one million triple-ply masks to the Haryana government, a press statement from the company informed on Wednesday.

Krishna Maruti is Maruti Suzuki's seat manufacturing joint venture with Ashok Kapur but has now actuvely joined the fight against coronavirus in the country. With car and car component manufacturing at a standstill owing to the national lockdown in place, Krishna Maruti has jumped in to manufacture masks which have been ceritifed by SITRA lab in Coimbatore.

While the first lot of two lakh face masks were recently given to Haryana state officials, the target is to donate a million. The current production scale allows for 50,000 of these masks to be manufactured each day, all while maintaining social distancing norms and taking precautionary measures, says the company.

Maruti says that it had received a request from Haryana government and the Centre towards the end of March on whether its production infrastructure could be used for developing and producing protective face masks. "After intensive work by engineers of Maruti Suzuki and Krishna Group with almost hourly monitoring by Maruti Suzuki management and active support by Department of Textiles, Government of India the mask was finally approved by SITRA laboratory," the company said in its press statement.

Krishna Maruti is now planning to further improve the quality of these masks. "We have committed 1 million masks each to Haryana and Gujarat Governments. I am also planning to import some machines and produce N-95 masks," said Ashok Kapur, Chairman, Krishna Group.

Auto companies have come out in a big way to help in the ongoing battle against coronavirus. Even though car and bike manufacturing remains paused, these companies are reaching out to the administration, people and societies to provide assistance.