LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh quickly put in place a strategy to optimise the medical oxygen supply, enabling it to ramp it up four times — from 250 metric tons to 1,000 metric tons — in only 10 days.
“The task at hand was arduous, but it had to be accomplished. We came to know that the oxygen demand of about 250 MT on normal days had quadrupled. The demand was met with some meticulous planning and scientific approach,” said an official statement from the state government.
The state government focused on the most important issue – location of assets and managing the movement of assets to carry as much oxygen as possible with an underlying focus on optimisation.
Within 24 hours of taking the call on the oxygen supply, the government activated its teams across the state and other sourcing states such as Jharkhand, Bengal and Odisha to intercept the trucks carrying oxygen cylinders, deployed an application that was downloaded on smartphones which were then placed in each of the trucks plying, without disturbing their route. The SOP was to keep the phone switched on and not touch it, because it was used to track the live location.
Key macro decisions were taken to deploy the rail network to bring oxygen supplies from the eastern states and airlift the empty cylinders with the help of the Air Force using stations in Agra, Hindon and Lucknow back for re-fills. This information was fed into a live dashboard, which displayed all the trucks carrying oxygen, helping the decision-makers to address the allocation gap smartly and swiftly to stabilise the fire-fight for the oxygen supply.
Real-time information on tankers and their movement, being the most critical element of the O2 supply chain, was displayed using the dashboard to decision-makers. The dashboard called ‘OxyTracker’ was used to visually flag the efficiency of the entire fleet.
State’s additional chief secretary (home) Awanish Awasthi said the focus was on a comprehensive approach — capacity building, which created five major hubs, Modinagar, Agra, Kanpur, Lucknow and Varanasi, and then Bareilly and Gorakhpur as secondary hubs for optimising the entire oxygen supply chain.