Tackling the issue of woeful inadequacy of oxygen to hospitals and shortage of Remdesivir injections to citizens and doctors alike, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari swung into action and directly contacted factories and firms involved in manufacturing of oxygen and remdesivir injections, and mopped up supply for Nagpur and other districts of Maharashtra. Due to shortage of oxygen and remdesivir injections the authorities were unable to add more beds for COVID-19 patients, leading to even more chaos and anger among citizens.

  

Gadkari has dispensed with formal structural meeting and converted his review into problem-solving exercise in real sense and went into action mode, interacted with key persons who could help in resolving the issue and himself led all the action. Taking things into his hand to tide over the grim situation, Gadkari while chairing a meeting at war room of Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC), straightway rang up oxygen manufacturer at Vizag and obtained 40 metric tonne oxygen for Nagpur hospitals. The manufacturer immediately sent the quantity to Nagpur and this is likely to ease the situation of Oxygen availability in the next 24 hours.

 

Gadkari then rang up the owner of Lloyds Steel at London and requested him to activate his plant at Wardha which also has Oxygen manufacturing unit of 350 metric tonne. It will require some repairs, but once it becomes operational, it can supply Oxygen to all districts of Vidarbha and Marathwada. Gadkari then roped in an expert from Sunflag who specialises in operating Oxygen units for steel and iron plants and asked him to explore the possibility of enhancing capacity of existing plants so that uninterrupted and assured supply of Oxygen can be provided to hospitals. Even a local plant owner was asked to divert his entire supply for the region and district administration was asked to provide more tankers to these manufacturers. 

 

 

 

Nitin Gadkari meets PM, Minister; 7 cos to manufacture Remdesivir Everywhere the shortage of Remdesivir injection is being witnessed. Taking serious cognisance of the same, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari rang up Drug Controller of India Somany and discussed the possibility of relaxing the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Act so that all major pharma manufacturing units can produce this injection and make it available at a much cheaper cost. Gadkari also met Union Minister Mansukh Mandviy and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and apprised them of the bad situation of Remdesivir injection. These injections will be manufactured at 7 places as 10 lakh vial per month. Through the efforts of Nitin Gadkari, till now Nagpur district has received 7,150 Remdesivir injections while the stock of equal number of injections is reaching Nagpur. The patent of manufacturing Remdesivir injection is with 4 companies and these four companies are preparing the medicines on war-footing. These companies are not able to supply the same in adequate quantity. Raising the issue at another level, Gadkari talked to Minister concerned and urged him to relax section 84 of IPR Act by which such permission can be granted to pharmaceutical companies to ensure enough supply of this life saving drug at cheaper cost without losing any further time. On the lines of the High Court order, Gadkari also directed officers to discard red-tape and provide life saving drugs to every needy patient by easing out the cumbersome procedures.