Steel plants in Maharashtra should divert oxygen for Covid patients: HC

Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court (HC) on Friday directed Nagpur divisional commissioner to requisition all the liquid oxygen, being produced by four steel plants in Maharashtra, for catering to the needs of Covid-19 patients across the state

Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court (HC) on Friday directed Nagpur divisional commissioner to requisition all the liquid oxygen, being produced by four steel plants in Maharashtra, for catering to the needs of Covid-19 patients across the state. The directors of the four plants at Bhandara, Thane, Pune and Dolvi in the Raigad district have been requested to agree to the arrangement to avoid compulsory requisitioning.

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The court also directed requisitioning of cylinders to bottle the oxygen being brought through the railway route in tankers. The court further directed the state to place a request before the central-level committee to fulfil the requirement of Remdesivir and posted a hearing of the suo motu (on its own) public interest litigation (PIL) on April 27.

The division bench of justices Sunil Shukre and SM Modak, while hearing the suo motu PIL and two other PILs, was informed by advocate MG Bhangde for the state and other state authorities that as per the order of the bench, the data on the distribution of Remdesivir in Nagpur district showed that there was no shortage of the drug. He, however, added that the indiscriminate use of the drug should be avoided.

The court observed that while it had received information about Nagpur, there was none about Amravati, and hence directed the addition of the divisional commissioner Amravati and its joint commissioner of FDA as respondents. The officials were asked to file affidavits with data on the present position of continuous supply of life-saving drugs such as Remdesivir, Favipiravir, Tocilizumab, Ivermectin and also the supply of oxygen throughout Covid care centres in their division.

The court then sought information on oxygen supply in Nagpur and asked advocate Aditya Goel, who filed an interim application, informing the court that the Lloyd steel plant and other steel plants had their oxygen-producing units and they could also be asked to divert the oxygen for overcoming the short supply.

The court accepted the suggestion and directed the divisional commissioner of Nagpur to place a request before the directors of the plants. “We request him to consider suggestions made by advocate Goel and examine if, under section 36 of Disaster Management Act, it can be requisitioned or not.” The court then observed, “In fact, we have full faith in the directors of this company that given the receipt of a humble request from the divisional commissioner of Nagpur, they would readily agree to submit the oxygen plant of their company and would not let any situation of compulsory requisitioning in any manner.”

When informed of the problem of bottling the oxygen coming on railway tankers from various parts of the country including Visakhapatnam due to a shortage of empty cylinders. The bench was informed that while the 11 oxygen distributors had 20,000 cylinders in circulation, there were manufacturing units and smaller plants that also used oxygen cylinders and around 3,400 additional cylinders could be easily requisitioned for bottling and distributing the oxygen coming from outside Maharashtra.

The court directed the Nagpur divisional commissioner to requisition the cylinders and said, “If required, form a team of officers who would be personally visiting units, and empty cylinders available can be taken with help of police and state reserve police force (SRPF). Needless to say, appropriate rent would have to be paid for owners of cylinders requisitioned in the public interest.”

With regards to the supply of Remdesivir, the bench was informed by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) that the Central government through the central level committee had asked all manufacturers to ramp up production of the drug to 2.69 lakh vials per day. The court then said, “We direct the state of Maharashtra to review the provisions regarding requirement of Remdesivir vials in state and if it is found more vials are required than those allotted, appropriate request with proper justification be made to the central level committee.”

The court while warning against the indiscriminate use of Remdesivir by doctors by not following Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) laid down by the State Covid Task Force the court said, “As long as no such instances of manifest misuse of the drug are brought to the notice of nodal officers and unless they seem to be completely in violation of mandatory SOP, the state machinery would not be in a position to take any action against medical experts who are wrongly prescribing a drug, this is the area which remains largely in the discretion of experts in the medical field and as such we would request all doctors treating Covid patients to try to scrupulously follow SOP unless, in their opinion, departure is necessary to save the life of patients.”