Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on May 23 formally received the Oxygen Express, a train carrying four containers of total 80 metric tonnes (MT) of medical oxygen at Inland Container Depot at Amingaon in Guwahati.
The Oxygen Express, which started from Jharkhand, reached Assam on May 23.
Talking to the media persons at the site, chief minister Sarma expressed his gratitude to prime minister Narendra Modi for allocating additional medical oxygen to the state through Oxygen Express which would greatly help in meeting the increasing oxygen requirement in the state, primarily for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.
The chief minister also thanked Union railway minister Piyush Goyal for taking steps to bring the train.
He also informed that from now onwards, Oxygen Express would come twice per week to Assam delivering total 160 MT of oxygen to the state every week. Apart from fulfilling state’s own requirement, Assam would supply surplus medical oxygen to neighbouring Northeast states of Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Tripura, he said.
The chief minister said that the state has medical oxygen storage capacity of up to 800 litres.
Reflecting on the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination drive in the state, the chief minister informed that the state government is making efforts to ramp up daily vaccination from present 50,000 people to 1 lakh.
