Mumbai, April 20 (IANS) Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has tweaked its manufacturing process at the Jamnagar Refinery to produce and distribute around 700 metric tonnes of medical grade oxygen every day to three states and a Union Territory, official sources said here on Tuesday.
The 700 tonnes of oxygen is being ferried daily for the past two days to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Union Territory of Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli free of cost in special tankers, as per their specific needs. It is sufficient to provide relief to at least 70,000 critically ill Covid-19 patients daily in these states and UTs.
The oxygen supply including transportation in special tankers at minus 183 degrees Celsius is being made free of cost to the beneficiary states/UTs as part of the RIL’s CSR initiatives.
The sources added that medical grade oxygen is not a product that was produced at the Jamnagar Refinery earlier.
However, with the current surge in demand due to a spike in Covid-19 cases, the RIL installed equipment and set up a process to produce and supply medical-grade oxygen by diverting industrial oxygen for the purpose.
The sources indicated that in case of demands from any other states in the country, the company would arrange to supply the medical-grade oxygen to them also.
Last Saturday, in a meeting with India Inc, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had appealed to them to make arrangements for priority production and supply of oxygen for Covid patients in the state. The industrialists had unanimously agreed to do so.
The Reliance Foundation set up the country’s first 250-bed Covid Hospital in collaboration with BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in the country’s commercial capital.
Later, it set up a fully-equipped isolation facility in Lodhivali in Maharashtra and supported a quarantine ward for suspect patients at Spandan Holistic Mother-and-Child Care Hospital in Mumbai.
The ICMR had identified the Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital in Mumbai for a multi-centre clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of the plasma therapy for Covid.
The hospital has also provided ‘home-based quarantine’ services which include medicines and consumables, vitals monitoring devices, home disinfectants, video consultation with doctors, home nursing and sample collections, besides a host of other Covid-related initiatives.
