Due to a shortfall of oxygen supply, the Madhya Pradesh government has banned the industrial use of oxygen. It is one of the measures taken by the government to resolve the medical crisis that emerged from the suspension of oxygen supply from Maharashtra.

"This is part of our short term plan; the immediate need is being taken care of as nothing except packaging needs to be changed to convert oxygen from industrial to medical use," said Madhya Pradesh Medical Education minister Vishwas Sarang.

However, the government has now claimed that it has surplus medical oxygen as the company that supplies oxygen to the state from its Maharashtra plant has made up for the loss through its UP and Gujarat plants. "We have also got an additional 30 tonnes from the SAIL plant in Chhattisgarh, so the immediate need is taken care of but we need to be self reliant as soon as possible," he said.

The minister said that the MP government is allotting land to a company in Babai where it would set up a plant that will be operational within the next eight to nine months.

The government said that the state right now has an assured supply of 180 metric tonnes of medical oxygen while the demand is somewhere between 110 to 120 metric tonnes per day.

Madhya Pradesh currently has more than 90,000 corona positive cases, along with 21,228 active cases and 1,791 deaths.