India is battling a ferocious second wave of the coronavirus that has overwhelmed its fragile and underfunded healthcare system. Hospitals are filled to capacity, medical oxygen supplies are running short and morgues and crematoriums are swamped. Amid this several Social Networking Site (SNS) users are sharing a video showing three men pasting a large sticker of Reliance Foundation and Reliance Industries on a cryogenic tanker with a false claim that the Mukesh Ambani-led company is stealing credit for the oxygen supplied by Saudi Arabia.
India’s major steel and petroleum companies are using their facilities to produce medical oxygen. Indian Railways is transporting medical oxygen through its Oxygen Express. The Indian Air Force is also airlifting empty cryogenic tankers from abroad. Several countries have come forward to help India in its hour of need by supplying PPE kits, ventilators, oxygen concentrators.
The Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) said it has ramped up its production of liquid medical oxygen (LMO) from zero to 1000 MT per day which constitutes more than 11% of the country’s total medical grade liquid oxygen production.
Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, the company has supplied over 55,000 MT of medical liquid oxygen to various State governments free of cost, it said. Its Chairman & Managing Director Mukesh Ambani is supervising the production and supplies from Jamnagar, it said.
“In addition to the production of high-quality medical grade liquid oxygen, the other challenge has been to quickly overcome the transportation bottleneck in its supply to various parts of the country. This necessitated increasing the loading capacity for its safe and quick transportation,” the company said.
The official Twitter handle of the Indian Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia had a tweet thanking the Saudi government for supplying 80 metric tons of liquid oxygen during the coronavirus crisis. The tweet also carried images of tankers deployed for the purpose. Meanwhile, a spokesperson from the Reliance Industries verified that the video is being shared with a misleading claim. She told that Reliance Group Chairman Mukesh Ambani is personally monitoring the group’s efforts to tackle shortage of medical oxygen in India.
She further shared a press release by the Reliance Group which clearly stated that Reliance has ramped up production of medical grade liquid oxygen and is facilitating transport of oxygen from Saudi Arabia by airlifting ISO containers. The company also converted nitrogen tankers into transport trucks for medical grade oxygen, through innovative and safe processes that were approved by the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organization (PESO). The company has organised the airlifting of 24 ISO containers to India from Saudi Arabia, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Thailand which were sourced from Saudi Aramco and BP, thus adding 500 MT of additional transportation capacity. More such containers are being organised, she said.
Thus, the viral claim along with the video is clearly misleading and is shared with no authentic grounds. Also, the container seen in the video is different from those sent by Saudi Arabia, Reliance itself is facilitating transport of containers from the country. Hence, the question of hijacking credits by relabelling oxygen containers is baseless.
