Instead, as states desperate to keep the oxygen for themselves bickered and fought, tankers were held up for hours at provincial borders by local police.Īnd three weeks after the deaths at Vinayak Hospital, the same nightmare unfolded in hospital after hospital across India. After all, the army had extensive experience in moving men and machines at short notice, building temporary bridges over flood waters and running convoys from centralized war rooms. The military could have been deployed to handle this nationwide operational emergency. It provided enough time for the supply chain and logistics for oxygen distribution to be worked out.
The deaths in Nalasopara in early April should have sounded the alarm for the rest of the country. His father was being intubated doctors said there was a 1 per cent chance he may make it. Inside the ward Rahul saw the other patients already draped from head to toe in sheets that were now shrouds. Ram Babu’s son Rahul got a call from the hospital informing him that his father was ‘critical’. His wife Rekha said they had already run up a bill of ₹150,000 and had dipped into the life savings that they had kept aside for the weddings of their children. One wall was plastered with portraits of gods – Durga, Krishna, Shiva on another, a clock hung lopsidedly, as if time itself had gone all topsy-turvy. On a high table in the same room, occupying pride of place, was Ram Babu’s sewing machine. At home, in a small room in the matchbox-sized apartments that are stacked up in narrow columns, his wife, son and daughter sat on the floor of a bare room, in wordless grief. Ram Babu Tailor, as everyone called him, was in that list of eleven.
0 kommentar(er)
