To solve oxygen crisis, Gurgaon admin ropes in firm that manages Amazon, Flipkart supply chain

The Gurgaon district administration has roped in a professional company managing the supply chain of e-commerce companies to make the process of supplying and managing oxygen cylinders smoother in the district.

According to officials, Divisional Commissioner Rajeev Ranjan held a virtual meeting with officials from the company, Vplak, and an artificial intelligence expert to discuss the matter on Saturday. Vplak, officials said, manages the supply chain of major e-commerce companies, including Amazon and Flipkart.

“At present, there is no accounting of oxygen cylinders since many people are taking these but a majority are not returning them. There are reports that several people are storing these cylinders,” said the Divisional Commissioner during the meeting, suggesting that bar coding may be a way to resolve this problem.

“Barcoding of oxygen cylinders may be done so that while distributing cylinders, mobile numbers and Aadhaar number of the recipient can be taken and, if any cylinder does not come for refilling within 48 hours, the details can be sent to the call centre,” he said.

From the call centre, officials said, a call would be made to the recipient to determine if they still need the oxygen, in which case the cylinder would be refilled, otherwise the recipient would be asked to return the cylinder “so that it can be given to another needy patient”.

“The Divisional Commissioner has asked the artificial intelligence expert, Pradeep Aggarwal, to devise a mechanism for proper utilisation of available resources,” said a spokesperson of the district administration.

After the meeting, Ranjan also appealed to people with a medical background to come forward to volunteer their skills in the efforts to contain the Covid pandemic.

“We will need more doctors and paramedical staff for additional facilities and to replace doctors who have themselves tested positive. The administration is looking for specialists in medicine, chest specialists, pulmonology, anaaesthesia, and other MBBS doctors. Besides, retired paramedical staff is also required,” he said.

The administration also developed a “mechanism” to allocate oxygen supply to hospitals, wherein the establishments have been asked to fill up and submit a Google form detailing their bed allotment and availability as well as oxygen requirements. Officials said allocation “will occur after optimisation based on various parameters”, and added that oxygen will be allocated only to those institutions that fill up the form.

The developments came even as hospitals in the city continued to put out appeals for help, with a private hospital, Kriti hospital in Sector 56, facing allegations that patients had died because of a shortage of oxygen.

While officials from the hospital as well as the Deputy Commissioner did not respond to calls and messages seeking comment, police officials denied these allegations.

“We received a call from an attendant of a patient at the hospital last night; people there were quite agitated. There have been around seven deaths there during the night, but from what our probe has revealed so far, these have been Covid-related, there was no shortage of oxygen. Nobody has registered a complaint seeking further investigation into the matter,” said inspector Pawan Malik, SHO of Sector 55/56
police station.

At 10.15 am, Columbia Asia hospital tweeted that they had just an hour of oxygen left. Four hours later, in a second tweet, the hospital said it had “got the required help”.