When Richa Shrivastava Chhabra and Vaibhav Chhabra learnt of the national lockdown on March 24, they decided that instead of being locked down at home, they-d stay at the Andheri East studio of their innovation lab Maker-s Asylum Mumbai. "We realised that we could isolate ourselves at the lab where we have all our equipment, infrastructure and technology, to use to help build the healthcare system," says Richa, managing partner. Together with Vaibhav and lab manager Narender Sharma, she researched face shields, an integral safety tool to prevent the spread of infection via the face and eyes. They had in fact, been researching the M19 shields a few weeks prior, anticipating the demand that would follow. "Our first prototype was pretty basic, but we put it out on social media for our fairly active and close-knit maker community. Soon after, we started getting enquiries from doctors about the production and scalability of the product. The beauty of this design was that it took just two minutes to create with R25 worth of raw material."

Abhinay Mane