Plea In Delhi High Court Seeks Mandatory Establishment Of Medical Oxygen PSA Plants In All The Delhi Hospitals

The Petition has been filed by one Ananya Kumar, through Advocates Vinay Kumar and Manan Aggarwal to agitating the cause of the people who are losing their precious life due to lack of medical oxygen in the Hospitals.

Averments in the plea

The plea states that the decision of the Union of India to set up 551 medical oxygen generation plants in hospital of every district of the country, isn't sufficient looking at the numbers of hospitals and population of the country.

The plea avers that India has enough stock of Medical oxygen but the issue relates to its transportation and that due to shortage of medical oxygen in the Hospitals, black marketing of medical oxygen is being done.

"The oxygen is an inflammable gas and to prevent accidents, it is stored and transported in cryogenic cylinders, but India does not have enough cryogenic cylinders. The main issue is that oxygen is a flammable material and it cannot be transported regularly," the plea submits

Stressing upon the importance of the Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) medical oxygen plants, the plea avers,

"It can become a permanent solution for all the above-mentioned problems which are being faced by the people in the present pandemic. That such a plant can come in varying capacities to generate oxygen, it employs a technology that absorbs nitrogen from ambient air to concentrate oxygen for supply to Hospitals and oxygen thus generated can be supplied straight to the site through a dedicated pipeline."

Importantly, the plea also argues that there are two obvious advantages of PSA oxygen plant:

• The first is that the Hospitals gets a captive plant that can generate all the oxygen it need, doing away with the need of cylinders and transportation, as the major problem of the country is not oxygen generation but oxygen transportation and;
• The second is handling cylinders also has a safety aspect to it as oxygen under high pressure is highly inflammable and several fires in Covid-19 hospitals across the country in the last few days have been grim reminders of those risks and a permanent PSA oxygen generation plant in the hospitals can take away the risk of handling cylinders.

Thus, the plea prays:

• Direction to the Central and Delhi Government to make it mandatory to existing big Hospitals whether Public or Private and any upcoming Hospitals in the future for establishing the medical oxygen PSA plants in their premises as per the capacity of the Hospital.
• Direct the Central and Delhi Government to make guidelines for establishing the medical oxygen PSA plants in Hospitals and execute the same in a time-bound manner.