New Delhi:
Amid a dire shortage of medical oxygen across the country, 48 cylinders of oxygen were seized from a house in Delhi on Friday.
A team of Delhi Police has recovered 32 big and 16 small cylinders of oxygen during a raid at the house in the south-west area of the national capital.
The owner of the house, Anil Kumar, who claimed to have a business of industrial oxygen, has been arrested. The 51-year-old couldn’t produce a license for his business, the police said.
The accused used to sell one small cylinder for Rs 12,500 after transferring oxygen from the bigger cylinders.
The police will distribute the recovered cylinders to the needy on Saturday, following a court order allowing the same.
India is scrambling to move large quantities of medical oxygen – by air, by train and by road – to hospitals in parts of the country hit hard by a record surge of COVID-19 cases.
The Defence Ministry informed today that 23 mobile oxygen generation plants are being airlifted from Germany as several states have been gasping due to shortage of medical oxygen amid a massive surge in coronavirus cases, officials told news agency PTI on Friday.
At 3,32,730, India’s daily infection total on Friday was higher than ever recorded anywhere in the world since the pandemic began last year.