Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd., which operates the world’s biggest refining complex in Gujarat, has started supplying oxygen from Jamnagar to Maharashtra at no cost to help battle a savage coronavirus outbreak in Maharashtra, according to a company official.
Reliance is diverting some oxygen streams meant for its petroleum coke gasification units after making it suitable for medical use, the official said. Also, the urban development minister confirmed that Maharashtra will get 100 tons of gas from Reliance, Eknath Shinde in his tweet in Marathi.
Besides Reliance, Bharat Petroleum Corporation has built up a stockpile of 20 tons of oxygen at its Kochi refinery for medical use, a company official said. The process in refineries involves the production of limited volumes of industrial oxygen in air-separation plants meant for nitrogen production. Only by scrubbing out other gases, such as carbon dioxide, medical-use oxygen can be extracted with 99.9% purity.
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India is in grip of the second wave of Covid-19 that has caught the federal and state governments unprepared. According to recent reports, Covid patients are dying due to a shortage of oxygen and hospital beds.
Maharashtra is the worst-hit state where the fresh outbreak is most severe. With rising active cases, the occupancy of beds in hospitals and Covid-19 centres is also increasing rapidly, but the state administration is more worried about the lack of oxygen.
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The Centre has recently given a go-ahead to the state government to get oxygen from places including Bellary in Karnataka, Haldia and Durgapur in West Bengal, Bokaro (Jharkhand), Rourkela (Odisha), Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, and Hyderabad in Telangana.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra continues to reel under the unprecedented Covid-19 surge, with a total of 765,094 cases recorded in the past 14 days. Even as the state began its 15-day lockdown, it recorded 58,952 fresh Covid-19 infections and 278 deaths, pushing the tally to 3,578,160 and toll to 58,804, the ninth straight day of over 50,000 new cases.