In the second week of May, as a brutal second wave of Covid-19 began to recede in Maharashtra, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray inaugurated ...
In the second week of May, as a brutal second wave of Covid-19 began to recede in Maharashtra, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray inaugurated a new industrial plant at a sugar factory in Osmanabad district.
It was no ordinary plant. The iron and steel structure, with giant cylinders nested in it, was an oxygen generation facility. The first in the state to come up within a sugar factory, it relied on the pressure swing adsorption technology to generate oxygen out of atmospheric air by filtering out other gases.
Barely used in the country until then, the PSA technology came into sharp focus in the second wave when India’s daily requirement of medical oxygen shot up to over 9,000 metric tonnes from the pre-pandemic level of 700 metric tonnes. As the country struggled to transport liquid medical oxygen over long distances, many patients died, even in hospitals.
Facing criticism for its failure to expand oxygen capacity, the Centre accelerated the installation of PSA plants in hospitals, since they are cheaper and quicker to set up compared to large-scale liquid medical oxygen units. State governments, in turn, came up with policies incentivising private investments in them.
Drawn to the windfall gains that many oxygen suppliers made during the...
