Delhi hospitals get O2 till morning; ‘beg, borrow, steal’: HC tells Centre
Centre raises quota | Max goes to court for emergency hearing | Centre assures unobstructed supply to Capital
NEW DELHI: After the Delhi High Court, in an emergency plea filed by Max hospitals seeking oxygen supply for patients, directed the Centre to ensure immediate supply is delivered safely and in time, the Union government assured the court that it would provide unobstructed passage to the supplies heading to Delhi and also give police protection to the vehicles.
Hours before the hearing, the Centre on Wednesday upped the quota from 387 MT liquid oxygen to 480 MT per day amid fervent pleas from Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to increase the city’s oxygen supply quota as the Capital gets a breather till Thursday morning, with more than 10 major hospitals already having called for help through SOS messages on Wednesday.
While Kejriwal thanked the Centre on Twitter soon after the hike in quota, the Delhi government has maintained that the city, at the current spread of infection, needs at least 700 MT of liquid oxygen. In fact, according to court filings by the Delhi government, the requirement is close to over 900 MT per day.
The emergency measure to increase oxygen supply to Delhi, albeit not to the levels the Delhi government had sought, came after several large private hospitals in the city ran out of oxygen on Wednesday morning, with their suppliers — mostly based in Haryana’s Faridabad saying that local authorities had occupied the supply facility and were not allowing the tankers to leave the state.
One such SOS message came from Max Hospitals, alerting that all six of its hospitals in Delhi and Gurugram were low on oxygen, some even as low as just two hours of supply, and that replenishment would be mandatory to avoid a crisis.
But around 8 pm on Wednesday, when the Faridabad supplier was yet to restore its supply, Max hospitals, through its parent company Balaji Medical and Research Centre filed an emergency plea in the Delhi High Court seeking immediate oxygen supply.
Fuming over the Centre’s indifference to the ground reality, the bench of Justices Vipin Sanghi and Rekha Palli ordered the Centre to immediately ensure that the supply to these hospitals is ensured, where around 1,400 patients urgently need it.
During the hearing, the court bashed the Centre for not waking up sooner and pulled it up for not immediately diverting industrial oxygen for medical use in Delhi. The bench went as far as to say: “We don’t care, beg, borrow, steal or requisition new plants if you want.”
While the hearing ended only after a few tankers had already left from the Faridabad supplier’s (Linde India) facility for Max hospitals and an assurance from the Delhi government through Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia that the hospitals would survive Wednesday night, it passed a slew of directions to ensure the promised supply of 480 MT oxygen reaches the city hospitals.