Sufficient oxygen stock in country, efforts on to hasten supply to high demand areas: MHA

Addressing a press conference here to update the efforts made by the MHA, the Additional Secretary in the Ministry Piyush Goyal also said the turnaround time of oxygen-carrying tankers was reduced to 1-2 hours from 4-5 days by taking the help of the Indian Air Force transport aircraft which have been ferrying empty tankers from the nook and corner of the country to the oxygen production plants.

“We have enough stock of oxygen, the issue was of transportation which we are trying to resolve by active involvement of all stakeholders,” Mr Goyal said.

Amidst the increasing demand for oxygen in the country due to the alarming surge of COVID-19 positive cases, he further said “There is absolutely no need to panic for oxygen as we are trying to resolve the issue of transportation from the producing states to high demand areas.”

The MHA officials also informed that the Centre is monitoring the movement of oxygen-carrying tankers on a real-time basis through GPS and making them available to hospitals in the shortest possible time.

Since April 23, Union Home Ministry has been coordinating efforts to deploy empty oxygen tankers and containers in various filling stations across the country to speed up the distribution of the much-needed medical oxygen in treating COVID-19 patients.

The situation in the country amid the second spell of Coronavirus infections continues to be grim with 3,52,991 people testing positive and a record 2,812 deaths reported on Monday.