Medical Oxygen: Distribution Is The Problem, Not Production
By A Special Correspondent
First publised on 2021-04-23 06:05:01
About the Author
Why is there a crisis of medical oxygen (MO) in India now at some places? There are three main reasons - one, the government could not anticipate the enormity of the looming crisis and there was administrative inertia; two, despite having ample production capacity, there is shortage of cylinders and tankers to transport the produce and three, while production is concentrated in the eastern region, demand is mainly from the western and the northern region, leading to logistics problem.
First of all, the government has to review the situation and acknowledge that it made a mistake in underestimating the demand. This it has done partly by taking a series of decisions. It has stopped industrial use of oxygen. The railways have started an oxygen express through a green corridor to facilitate easy and fast transportation. The government has also given orders to import 50000MT of MO. Prime Minister Modi has had a series of meetings with officials as well as producers of oxygen to find out ways of getting over the crisis. But the sad part is that all this happened after courts intervened.
Before that, there was undue - almost criminal - delay in starting the tender process for 162 oxygen plants at hospitals, even though the empowered committee had given in-principle go-ahead eight months back, despite it being the most cost effective way to ensure uninterrupted MO supply in hospitals. There was no effort to procure more oxygen cylinders and tankers even after the experience of the first wave when it was known from experience around the world that successive waves of coronavirus were more dangerous and infected a larger number of people.
The government must work out an equitable way to distribute currently produced MO. It must arrange thousand of cylinders fast and order hundreds of cryogenic tankers to transport MO. It must also arrange to deliver empty cylinders back to the manufacturing plants fast. It must press into service the entire MO production capacity in the country. As the Supreme Court has said, in these troubled times, even Sterlite should be allowed to reopen its copper plant near Tuticorin, which was closed for flouting pollution norms, just to produce the installed capacity of 1000MT of oxygen. In short, everything possible needs to be done, and fast.
pic courtesy: thedailystar
