Within 15-20 Seconds, I Got A Call From Cabinet Secretary: BMC Chief Reveals How Centre Coordinated Over Oxygen Crisis

BMC Chief Iqbal Singh Chahal has opened up about swift coordination between the municipal corporation and the central government as Mumbai was dealing with a shortage of liquid medical oxygen as the Covid-19 cases rose in mid-April.

Chahal revealed that six hospitals in the city, hosting 168 patients, were running out of oxygen on the intervening night of 16-17 April. However, there was a jumbo Covid centre that had around 850 empty oxygenated beds and all those patients were redeployed to the same in the middle of the night.

Then at 7 am, Chahal sent across urgent messages over the brewing crisis to the top functionaries of the central and the state government.

“Within 15-20 seconds, I had an incoming call coming from the Cabinet Secretary, Rajiv Gauba. He told me, tell me what you want… I said we have to import oxygen into the state. I told him that we can’t manufacture oxygen at such short notice and that the turnaround time for oxygen coming from Haldia was around eight days,” the BMC chief told the Indian Express.

He added, “I told him that Reliance Industries was just 16 hours away from Mumbai, in Jamnagar, and oxygen tankers can come from there every night. He said that such an allocation cannot be made just for one city. I told him that he can allocate it to Maharashtra and I will make sure that it comes to Mumbai city only… And then 125 MT of oxygen was allocated to us from Jamnagar.”

“The same evening, tankers started moving and now the problem (of oxygen) has virtually become history in Mumbai because of great help from the Government of India,” the senior bureaucrat was quoted as saying in the report.

Chahal also rebuffed any conjectures of strained centre-state relations as he believes that most of the talks happen at bureaucratic level between colleagues who are like batchmates.