Bengaluru gets help to breathe better: Passing on Oxygen amid second wave of Covid

Battling oxygen shortage during the ongoing second wave of Covid, an initiative, Pass the Oxygen’ has been initiated to convince people to donate or lend their old oxygen cylinders and concentrators to those in need.

When a city is gasping for breath, what do you do? Collect oxygen cylinders! That’s exactly what a group of Bangaloreans have started doing. “The situation in the city is very grim. In the second wave of Covid, it has been an uphill task to arrange for medicines, oxygen cylinders and concentrators. Many people have bought cylinders and kept it at home, taking them out of circulation for others. With Bengaluru gasping for air, we decided to start the campaign to tell people to donate oxygen cylinders for others in need,” says Freeda Lazar, one of the minds behind Pass The Oxygen initiative, which aims to make oxygen accessible and affordable.

An initiative in Bengaluru, Pass The Oxygen is motivating denizens to donate old oxygen cylinders to help others in need.

The volunteers of this initiative aim to make oxygen accessible and affordable for all.

Some Bangaloreans are trying to provide respite to people who are in need of sourcing oxygen by creating a database of acquired cylinders and circulating them after verification. “There are multiple ways people can contribute towards the initiative. Firstly, they can donate the cylinder to us, and we will refill it and pass it on. Or they can just loan it to us for a specific time period and we’ll make sure it reaches back to them. If contributors don’t have cylinders, they can also simply make a donation which we can use to buy more oxygen cylinders,” says Arshiya Sayed, a volunteer with CoV-aid Bengaluru, a citizen volunteer group.

Sayed, with a group of 11 other volunteers from CoV-aid Bengaluru, manages the groundwork with help of 10 autorickshaw drivers, who are helping refill and transport the essentials to those in need. “We understood early on that transportation was a problem for those cases where the entire families are down with coronavirus. So the auto drivers helped us out. Our work turns immensely meaningful when we are able to help out people in need. We recently provided an oxygen concentrator to a 7-year-old in Bengaluru, after transporting it across the city, and to see him recover was amazing,” recalls Sayed.

As a gesture of gratitude to those who are donating these cylinder, the team is renaming the cylinders after the person chosen by the donor.

The team is renaming the cylinders after the person they choose. “We are grateful for the life-saving step people are choosing to take, and in return we are renaming the cylinder after the person that means the world to them. We will always refer to a cylinder by that name, as a way to remember them every time a particular cylinder goes around helping save lives,” adds Lazar.

And one such contributor is Mayura P Kadur, whose donated cylinder is named Prabhakar, in memory of her father who passed away in 2017. She shares, “I saw the initiative on a friend’s Instagram story, and thought of the cylinder we had in storage from my dad’s clinic. I spoke to my mother about the initiative and she said that we should give it away so that they can help someone in need in the present times, as opposed to just keeping it for ourselves. I hope more people come forward to donate cylinders.”

Author tweets @bhagat_mallika

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