Reason behind the crisis of medical oxygen in India

Abhinandan's Blog
3 min readMay 7, 2021

There is a serious crisis of medical oxygen cylinders in India right now.

As an unfortunate but obvious result, hundreds of people are dying everyday from each states.

One can understand the intensity of this danger of shortage of medical oxygen by the fact that, before COVID, the daily requirement of medical oxygen in India was 750 MT (Metric Tons).

During the first wave of COVID, it hiked up to 2500 MT/day and now, during this disastrous second wave, it went to 6600 MT/day.

Now, as per MoHFW, India is capable of producing 7287 MT of liquid oxygen on a daily basis.

-So, where is the problem if India is producing oxygen more than its requirement?

The problem isn’t in producing oxygen. It’s about the transportation. The liquid oxygen can’t be transported by air. So, it can either by transported by road or by railways.

Also, it can’t be transferred by the normal liquid gas containers. It needs special type of container named ‘Cryogenic container’.

And, there is a serious shortage on production of these ‘Cryogenic containers’ right now in India. It takes 4–6 months to produce this kind of container.

Well, as always, the government wasn’t prepared for this sudden crisis.

Being helpless, some states are now importing oxygen cylinders from Thiland and Singapore. But, as the transportation process is being done by road, it’s taking such a big time to arrive.

Also, the administrative causes and disputes between the central and state government are responsible for further delay.

In several occasions, oxygen cylinders were found to be transported with a surveillance by police.

To avoid these kinds of transportation problems, many hospitals are now demanding for a PSA (Pressure Swing Absorption) plant to produce medical oxygen.

The benefit of a PSA plant is that, it can be directly connected with the hospitals and hospitals will have all the controls to use oxygen as per their requirement.

In 21 October, 2020, Central Medical Service Society released a tender to build PSA plants for 150 district hospitals out of which 33 are built successfully till date.

In Delhi, out of 8 plants, only one is operating currently.

Now, the problem isn’t of funds as the ‘PM cares fund’ is taking care of that. The main problem is the land disputes in different areas.

There is a constant fight going on between the state governments and the central government regarding the sanction of land and handling the manufacturer company.

In middle of this fight, people got sandwiched.

Due to these disputes, everybody is sacrificing the lives of their closed ones.

In conclusion, I’ll say that, please save your precious money to spend it in care of your close ones, if they need unfortunately.

And, please don’t listen to these people:

Thanks for reading.

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