Amid the shortage of liquid Oxygen across the country, the Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has tweaked its manufacturing process at Jamnagar Refinery to produce and distribute around 700 metric tonnes of medical grade oxygen everyday to three states and a Union Territory.

For the past two days, RIL has been transporting 700 metric tonnes of medical Oxygen daily to the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Union Territory of Dadra, Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu, free of cost through special tankers.

The 700 tonnes of medical oxygen is sufficient to provide relief to at least 70,000 critically ill Covid-19 patients daily in three states and UT.

Sources said that the RIL was prepared  to supply medical Oxygen  for other states in the country as well, provided there were specific requests from the states concerned and they were ready to bear the transportation cost.

Given that the medical grade oxygen was not produced earlier at the Jamnagar refinery, RIL has installed equipment and setup process to produce and supply medical-grade oxygen by diverting industrial oxygen to produce medical-grade oxygen to pitch its contribution to meet the demand for medical Oxygen. “Currently, the entire supply of oxygen, including transportation in special tankers at (-) 183oC is being made free of cost to the state governments as a part of RIL’s CSR initiative. This is one more initiative of the Reliance Industries and Reliance Foundation to provide relief in the ongoing pandemic,” an RIL spokesperson said.

At a meeting with prominent industrialists and leaders of Corporate houses held here on Saturday last, Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray had among other things  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 the needful. It may be recalled that Reliance Foundation had earlier set up country’s first Covid hospital in Mumbai In collaboration with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in just two weeks. After setting up a 100-Covid bed hospital initially, it scaled up the bed capacity to 260.

Reliance Foundation also developed a fully-equipped isolation facility at Lodhivali in Maharashtra and handed it over to the district authorities there. It also supported the setting up of a quarantine ward for suspected patients at Spandan Holistic Mother-And-Child Care Hospital in Mumbai.

Reliance Foundation supported digital and medical infrastructure at Sardar Patel COVID-19 Care Centre, Delhi. In addition, Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital, which was the first institute in Maharashtra identified by ICMR to be part of a multicentre clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of plasma therapy, set up an exclusive 10 bedded dialysis centre in HBT Trauma Hospital, Mumbai in collaboration with BMC.

Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital, the Sir H.N. Reliance Foundation Hospital also provided home quarantine services. It provided over 5.5 lakh litres of free fuel, supporting over 14,000 ambulances across 249 districts in 18 states.  It produces 1,00,000 PPE and face masks per day for India’s health and frontline workers.