Foreign aid reached India on April 25. Centre took 7 days to notify SOP as oxygen crisis deepened

As India battled a severe shortage of oxygen and other medical supplies, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare took a week to frame SOP despite foreign relief first arriving in India on April 25 from Singapore.

Around 40 nations across the world announced that they would send medical supplies and assistance to help India deal with the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic that has devastated many parts of the country. The first consignments of medical supplies from foreign nations arrived in India on April 25 from Singapore. Since then, tonnes of foreign aid in the form of oxygen generators, concentrators and ventilators were received by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) officials in the past one week. It, however, has come to light that while the first consignment of Covid-19 assistance arrived in India on April 25, the Centre took seven days to frame the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) of distributing these life-saving medical supplies among states even as hospitals begged for oxygen and people succumbed to the deadly disease.