When the Allahabad High Court called oxygen shortage during COVID ‘not less than a genocide’

SHRINATHJI and Murari Gas Station were the sole providers of oxygen to Lucknow’s hospitals—Shrinathji supplied to Lok Bandhu and Balrampur hospitals, Murari sustained forty-one others.

A group of policemen guarding Murari Gas Station opened up to me.

‘There are more than 500 people here. We understand their anguish. With hospitals turning them away and the government refusing to allow them to get oxygen from the plants, their miseries have doubled,’ one of them lamented. ‘Our hands are tied. We have been given orders to prevent them from entering the gas stations.’

Twenty-two-year-old Amritanshu Pandey, who had travelled from Jankipuram in Lucknow to the gas station, approached the policeman I was talking to. His father, Sukhdev Pandey’s oxygen saturation had fallen below 60. Amritanshu hadn’t been able to secure a hospital bed for him; he was isolating at home.

‘We rushed from one gas station to another, but none would refill the cylinder,’ Amritanshu told me. ‘In Lucknow, every hospital bed equipped with oxygen supply is occupied. There is no help.’ 

Even the elderly stood in queues for oxygen, hospital beds or tests for hours. Elderly couples, with their children living in faraway cities and countries, were particularly vulnerable. It was the worst time to be alone.

M.D. Singh, stood in the same queue as Amritanshu Pandey. He lived on the bustling Cantt Road with his wife Aruna Singh, aged seventy-six. She was COVID-positive and had a history of diabetes. He stood crying, watching young and old men lifting heavy steel and aluminium cylinders into cars and onto bikes to run to another gas station.

Experts criticised the government’s directive to deny oxygen to those who were isolated in homes as ‘arbitrary’. There was no merit in the order, many said. Dr A.K. Shukla, a former Chief Medical Officer, described it as a ‘blanket order’.

‘Halting oxygen supply to individuals is a bad decision,’ he asserted. ‘It’s not just COVID patients who need oxygen but also those with asthma. Where will they go? The government should reconsider its order.’

Despite the government taking the most stringent measures to direct oxygen through official channels, the crisis had reached a point where even hospitals did not receive the necessary high flow oxygen. Across the city, ambulances waited at the gates of oxygen plants and supply agencies. Hospital administrators raised alarms when their stock ran out.

Nishant Singh, the manager at Make Well Hospital in Gomti Nagar, said ‘We have appealed to the government that if they can provide half the number of oxygen cylinders we need, we will try to procure the rest. But there has been no assistance. Even our regular vendors are out of oxygen. We have had to put shortage notices on our gates.’