The missteps that led India into an oxygen shortage amid a devastating Covid-19 surge
- Supply has been boosted and donations are coming in, but patients still suffocate to death in hospitals and relatives are seeking supplies on the black market
- Poor planning and logistical problems have played a part, as have superspreader events, religious beliefs about cow dung, and a flesh-eating black fungus
In the past three weeks, more than 68 trains carrying 4,200 tonnes of liquid medical oxygen have travelled from Indian states that produce it, such as Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal, to cities that are in dire need of it, like New Delhi, Lucknow and Bangalore.
Oxygen manufacturers say they have boosted supplies tenfold, while New Delhi has diverted all industrially produced oxygen, which accounts for 90 per cent of the country’s total production, to the health care sector.
Meanwhile, Indian military aircraft and vessels have brought in cryogenic tanks for transporting oxygen, oxygen concentrators to help people breathe, electrical generators and drugs from countries like Singapore, Australia and France. The United States and Britain have shipped ventilators, oxygen concentrators, masks and drugs.
Yet seven weeks since India began experiencing exponential growth in virus infections and deaths, stories of patients suffocating to death in hospitals with no oxygen supplies and a black market in oxygen canisters fuelled by helpless citizens continue to dominate headlines.
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India’s seeming failure to control the spread of Covid-19 in what is now the world’s epicentre of the pandemic has led critics to ask why a nuclear power and rising industrial powerhouse did not take stronger steps earlier to prevent this catastrophe.