Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: India’s largest private company Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has now become the country’s largest producer of medical-grade liquid oxygen from a single location, at 1,000 metric tons daily, at a crucial time when the country is grappling with an unprecedented second wave of Covid-19 pandemic.
RIL’s refinery-cum-petrochemical complex in Jamnagar and other facilities, now produce this oxygen, which is over 11 percent of India’s total production, and meet the needs of nearly one in every 10 patients.
“For me and for all of us at Reliance, nothing is more important than saving every life as India battles against a new wave of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, and Managing Director, media reported on Saturday.
“There is an immediate need to maximize India’s production and transportation capacities for medical grade oxygen. I am proud of our engineers at Jamnagar who have worked tirelessly, with a great sense of patriotic urgency, to meet this new challenge,” he said.
Under his personal supervision, Reliance adopted a two-pronged approach to strengthening the availability of medical oxygen. One: refocusing several industrial processes at Reliance’s Jamnagar and other facilities for rapid scale-up in production of medical-grade liquid oxygen, and two, augmenting loading and transportation capacities to ensure its swift and safe supply to states and union territories across India.
Nita Ambani, Founder-Chairperson of Reliance Foundation, said the plants at RIL’s Jamnagar refinery have been repurposed overnight to produce medical-grade liquid oxygen that is being distributed across India.
Reliance said this oxygen is being provided free-of-cost to several state governments to bring immediate relief to over one lakh patients on a daily basis.
Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, Reliance has supplied over 55,000 MT of medical-grade liquid oxygen across the country.
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