Under intense pressure to bridge the oxygen demand-supply gap and sort out the logistical issues hampering its efforts, the Andhra Pradesh government has set up a State Oxygen War Room (SOWR) and is in the process of constituting District Oxygen War Rooms (DOWRs).
These war rooms are tasked with procuring oxygen, arranging it’s transportation to covid hospitals and care centres and ensuring safe storage for using it in the coming months.
The increasing number of covid patients requiring oxygen for survival prompted the government to accord top priority to augmenting the production and supply infrastructure and setting up the war rooms to ensure proper coordination that is crucial for preventing fatalities.
According to an official release, the SOWR and DOWRs will see to it that the required oxygen is dispatched to district headquarters hospitals and other major covid care facilities and refills are done properly and in time.
Basically, the responsibility of pooling up oxygen and allocating it to the districts rests with the SOWR, which is also mandated to keep a watch on the usage of oxygen.
The SOWR is headed by IAS officers M.T. Krishna Babu and S. Shan Mohan. They will be assisted by nodal officers of Industries, Medical & Health, Transport, Revenue & Disaster Management (R&DM), Police and IT Departments.
Each one of these Departments have been entrusted with specific responsibilities to accomplish the larger task of making enough quantities of oxygen available to hospitals without any hindrances.
The Industries Department was asked to procure oxygen from all possible sources and even get closed units reopened for the sake of producing as much oxygen as possible, and more importantly, get B and D type (industrial) cylinders converted into medical oxygen cylinders.
The role of R&DM, Transport and Police Departments is to provide for smooth transportation of oxygen containers and cylinders and to source the life - saving gas from Karnataka, Odisha and Tamil Nadu and from Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, which is a major contributor of oxygen.
The Police Department will be facilitating the oxygen transportation by opening green corridors wherever needed.
The Transport Department will get the oxygen containers and cylinders moving on trains and air if the situation warrants. As far as the IT Department is concerned, it plays a crucial part too by tracking the oxygen consignments through GPS and GIS mapping.