Haryana CM Shri Manohar Lal today inaugurated four oxygen PSA generator plants in a virtual mode, donated and installed by Maruti Suzuki under its CSR initiative. This is the first batch of 4 Oxygen PSA generation plants commissioned in 3 Government Hospitals of Haryana as announced by Maruti Suzuki.
By end-April when the Covid second wave was shooting up, Maruti Suzuki started to look for purchasing oxygen generator plants to meet the crisis for its CSR program. The Company discovered that there are very few small scale manufacturers in the country making these. They were loaded with orders but had little capacity or wherewithal to produce and deliver these in any reasonable period of time. Just paying money could not have helped; they needed manufacturing scale-up. The Company decided to make it a Company initiative rather than just a CSR initiative and activated its Supply Chain division, roped in its supplier partners M/s JBML, M/s SKH Metals and M/s Motherson to help scale up the manufacturing activity of PSA manufacturers M/s Airox Nigen, M/s Sam Gases and M/s Gaskon. This arrangement was on a not-for-profit basis. In less than a month, this arrangement has reached an output of 6 plants per day as further stated by Maruti Suzuki.
The first 24 such plants will be installed by Maruti Suzuki and its suppliers as a CSR initiative within the first half of June ‘21. A separate team has been deployed with round the clock monitoring to ensure that these generator plants are installed successfully in hospitals and are operational. The monitoring will continue for a few months to ensure that these generators keep operating satisfactorily well after installation.
Explaining the initiative, Mr R C Bhargava, Chairman, MSIL, said, “Maruti Suzuki is supporting these 3 manufacturers to increase their production of PSA plants for oxygen for Covid. Within one month of our entering this project, our people have been able to increase the capacity of building Oxygen Generator plants by 10 times. This arrangement will deliver about 70 plants in May and 150 in June and this is more than the total estimated production in India in the financial year 2020-21.”
“On the topic of Oxygen supply chain, I think we should seriously study the benefits of on-site Oxygen generator plants as transporting oxygen over large distances seems to be a very sub-optimal solution,” Mr Bhargava said.
