Record 1031.43 MT of oxygen supplied in UP
LUCKNOW : A record 1031.43 metric tonne (MT) of oxygen was supplied to medical colleges, hospitals and oxygen refilling centres across UP in the last 24 hours.
National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Ayog lauded UP model of oxygen supply. In a tweet, the NITI Ayog said, “The Uttar Pradesh government has established oxygen hubs and developed dashboard–Oxytracker through which tankers can be tracked in real time. This allows quick and smart allocation of oxygen. The result is that 1,000 MT of oxygen has been lifted instead of 250 MT before.”
Giving this information, additional chief secretary, home, Awanish Kumar Awasthi, who is monitoring the oxygen supply across the state from the control room set up in the home department, said with the sudden spike in Covid cases, the state government started working to stabilise the situation as quickly as possible and stop it from getting worse.
“Oxygen being one of the most critical elements for clinical treatment had to be managed at a war footing. The state government focused on the most important metric-location of assets and managing the movement of assets to carry as much oxygen as possible with an underlying focus on optimisation,” he said on Thursday.
Within 24 hours, the state government activated the teams all over the state and other sourcing states like Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha to intercept the trucks carrying oxygen cylinders, deployed an application that was downloaded on smart phones which were placed in each truck without disturbing its ongoing route for live locations.
The GPS device was not used as it would have taken four days to install it and would have meant loss of lives at an exponential scale, he said.
Uttar Pradesh worked on stealth approach- speed and scale. Key macro decisions were taken to deploy the rail network to bring oxygen supplies from the eastern states to UP and airlift empty cylinders with the help of the Indian Air Force, using airports located at Agra, Hindon and Lucknow for refilling, Awasthi added.
The information of oxygen supply was fed into live dashboard which displayed all the trucks carrying oxygen and helped the decision makers address the allocation gap smartly and swiftly to stabilise the firefight for the oxygen supply, real time information on tankers and their movement being the most critical element of the oxygen supply chain was displayed using the dashboard. The dashboard called Oxytracker was used to visually flag the efficiency of the entire fleet with one sweep of the eye, he said.
The UP government created five major hubs in UP— Modinagar, Agra, Kanpur, Lucknow and Varanasi— as primary hubs while Gorakhpur and Bareilly were developed as secondary hubs for optimising the entire oxygen supply chain, Awasthi added.