THE sub-group constituted by the Supreme Court to audit Oxygen consumption in hospitals in national capital during the second wave of COVID-19 said that the Delhi Government “exaggerated” the consumption of oxygen and made a claim of 1140 MT, four times higher than the formula for bed capacity requirement of 289 MT.

The five-member panel headed by AIIMS Director Randeep Guleria said the Delhi Government had made the claims for allocation of 700 MT oxygen on April 30 of medical grade Oxygen using a “wrong formula”. The top court had on May 6 named a sub-group for carrying out the audit exercise for Delhi’s health infrastructure and allocation of oxygen and said that it shall consists of Randeep Guleria of AIIMS, Sandeep Budhiraja of Max Healthcare and two IAS officers not below the rank of Joint Secretary -- one each from the Centre and the Delhi Government.

The panel in its report pointed out that four model hospitals in Delhi --Singhal Hospital, Aruna Asaf Ali Hospital, ESIC Model Hospital and Liferay Hospital -- have claimed extremely high Oxygen consumption with very few beds and the claims appeared to be clearly “erroneous, leading to extremely skewed information and significantly higher Oxygen requirement for entire state of Delhi”. The panel, which submitted its interim report to the top court, said that during the meetings of the sub-group, it was repeatedly noted that there was a “gross discrepancy” in the data recorded from proformas.

“Additional secretary, Department of Promotion of Indian Industry and Internal Trade, Government of India, expressed anguish over the way the data was collated by Government of NCT Delhi, as it still has a lot of errors which have been pointed out. It is still not clear on what basis had an allocation of 700 MT been sought by the Government of Delhi in the Supreme Court of India when collated data had so many errors and it took an Oxygen audit to point out the same”, the 23-page interim report said.

There’s no report approved by SC, claims Sisodia: DEPUTY Chief Minister Manish Sisodia claimed there is no report approved by the Supreme Court-appointed Oxygen Audit Committee about Delhi exaggerating its oxygen requirement by four times during the 2nd wave of pandemic.