SHRINATHJI and Murari Gas Station were the sole providers of oxygen to Lucknow’s hospitals—Shrinathji supplied to Lok Bandhu and Balrampur hospitals, Murari sustained forty-one others.
A group of policemen guarding Murari Gas Station opened up to me.
‘There are more than 500 people here. We understand their anguish. With hospitals turning them away and the government refusing to allow them to get oxygen from the plants, their miseries have doubled,’ one of them lamented. ‘Our hands are tied. We have been given orders to prevent them from entering the gas stations.’
Twenty-two-year-old Amritanshu Pandey, who had travelled from Jankipuram in Lucknow to the gas station, approached the policeman I was talking to. His father, Sukhdev Pandey’s oxygen saturation had fallen below 60. Amritanshu hadn’t been able to secure a hospital bed for him; he was isolating at home.
‘We rushed from one gas station to another, but none would refill the cylinder,’ Amritanshu told me. ‘In Lucknow, every hospital bed equipped with oxygen supply is occupied. There is no help.’
Even the elderly stood in queues for oxygen, hospital beds or tests for hours. Elderly couples, with their children living in faraway cities and countries, were particularly vulnerable. It was the worst time to be alone.
M.D. Singh, stood in the same queue as Amritanshu Pandey. He lived on the bustling Cantt Road with his wife Aruna Singh, aged seventy-six. She was COVID-positive and had a history of diabetes. He stood crying, watching young and old men lifting heavy steel and aluminium cylinders into cars and onto bikes to run to another gas station.
Experts criticised the government’s directive to deny oxygen to those who were isolated in homes as ‘arbitrary’. There was no merit in the order, many said. Dr A.K. Shukla, a former Chief Medical Officer, described it as a ‘blanket order’.
‘Halting oxygen supply to individuals is a bad decision,’ he asserted. ‘It’s not just COVID patients who need oxygen but also those with asthma. Where will they go? The government should reconsider its order.’
Despite the government taking the most stringent measures to direct oxygen through official channels, the crisis had reached a point where even hospitals did not receive the necessary high flow oxygen. Across the city, ambulances waited at the gates of oxygen plants and supply agencies. Hospital administrators raised alarms when their stock ran out.
Nishant Singh, the manager at Make Well Hospital in Gomti Nagar, said ‘We have appealed to the government that if they can provide half the number of oxygen cylinders we need, we will try to procure the rest. But there has been no assistance. Even our regular vendors are out of oxygen. We have had to put shortage notices on our gates.’
Charak Hospital faced a similar dilemma. ‘The oxygen crisis hasn’t been resolved yet. It has paralysed our efforts,’ Suparna Dutta, a staff member went on record.
Ultimately, hospitals had to shut their doors to new patients even when beds were vacant.
At the beginning of May, an Allahabad High Court bench comprising Justice Siddharth Verma and Justice Ajit Kumar took cognizance of the shortage of oxygen. ‘We are pained at observing that COVID patients have died due to short supply of oxygen in hospitals. It is a criminal act and no less than a genocide by those who have been entrusted with the task of ensuring continuous procurement and supply chain of liquid medical oxygen.’ The state reacted only when made aware of the outrage on social media.
For instance, in UP, the orders and notices were released on Twitter before being sent in the form of official communication from the state to the concerned departments. When CM Yogi Adityanath tweeted that symptomatic patients would also be admitted, I went to some hospitals to check if they were indeed admitting symptomatic patients. Most hospitals said that it was a tweet, not an order. They waited for it to turn into an official, written order.
Over the years, we have seen how the state has skillfully used social media and the pandemic was no different. When it came to concrete results, outcomes fell severely short of expectations. The then UP Health Minister, Jai Pratap Singh, assured that the state was taking the necessary measures to overcome the oxygen crisis.
‘All hospitals will have adequate oxygen supply very soon,’ he said. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, taking a firm stand against the illicit trading of oxygen, warned that those caught selling oxygen on the black market would be prosecuted under the National Security Act (NSA).
According to a report by the BBC, India’s healthcare facilities typically accounted for 15 per cent of the country’s oxygen consumption, leaving majority of the share—85 per cent—for industrial use. But during the second wave, nearly 90 per cent of the country’s oxygen was redirected for medical care. In response to the crisis, the Indian government allocated 7,500 metric tonnes of oxygen per day to healthcare consumption.
After the first wave, the central health ministry had allocated a budget of 201.58 crores to set up new oxygen plants. In October 2020, it invited bids for 162 pressure swing adsorption (PSA) plants across the country.
However, by the time the second wave hit, only thirty-three had been installed. The government tweeted that fifty-nine more would be installed by the end of April, and the remaining eighty by the end of May.
As during the migrant exodus, ‘Shramik’ trains were flagged off to send people back to their home states, trains named ‘Oxygen Express’ were started in order to deliver Liquid Medical Oxygen (LMO) tankers to hospitals across India. First, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra sought critical assistance from Indian Railways, and then Uttar Pradesh joined in.
The Indian Railways dispatched its second ‘Oxygen Express‘ from Lucknow carrying seven–eight empty tankers to Jharkhand’s Bokaro to collect liquid medical oxygen.
The Ministry of Railways said that between 19 April and mid-May, Oxygen Express trains delivered over 8,700 tonnes of liquid medical oxygen in more than 540 tankers to oxygen-starved states. When this data was released, there were six Oxygen Express trains on their way to various states with 475 metric tonnes of liquid medical oxygen in thirty-five tankers.
The Indian Air Force was also mobilised to airlift oxygen supplies from military installations, importing 50,000 metric tonnes of liquid oxygen.
The Union Health Ministry issued a statement that said the government was also floating a tender for importing 50,000 million metric tonnes of medical oxygen; the Ministry of External Affairs was tasked with exploring possible sources.
So desperate measures were taken to counter the acute oxygen crisis. However, when it came to documenting COVID deaths due to lack of oxygen, there is no official data available. It was later revealed that in the medical reports issued during the second wave, oxygen shortage wasn’t cited as a cause of death. The deaths were, instead, attributed to co-morbidities.
In the Parliament sessions that followed the second wave, the government informed the House that no COVID deaths had been reported due to the lack of oxygen supply. This happened first in July 2021, when Bharati Pravin Pawar, minister of state, health and family welfare, told the Rajya Sabha that no deaths due to lack of oxygen had been specifically reported by the states and union territories. His response came in reply to Congress MP K.C. Venugopal, who asked whether it was true that many patients had died on roads and in hospitals due to shortage of oxygen; he also asked what steps the government had taken afterwards to ensure that there would be no scarcity during the imminent third wave of infections.
The government reiterated this stance when a similar question was asked in the Parliament six months later. In Uttar Pradesh, the state government aligned with the central government—in the legislative council, Health Minister Jai Pratap Singh claimed that the state had issued 22,915 death certificates and none of them mentioned lack of oxygen as the cause of death.
The migrant exodus during the first wave and the oxygen crisis during the second wave were largely unmitigated disasters that warrant continued scrutiny.
In 2025, when the Civil Registration System (CRS) report was finally released, the journalists who had covered the second wave stood vindicated.
For people, who had long suspected the undercounting, the ORGI report was a confirmation of the truth. Excess deaths (the difference between the total number of deaths in 2020–21 and the average death rate of the previous years) in 2021 alone, were nearly six times higher than the officially reported COVID-19 deaths.
Some states were disproportionately affected by the underreporting of COVID deaths. For instance, in the case of states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, the number of excess deaths far exceeded the respective official COVID-19 fatality figures.
The undercounting left a vast population deprived of the state’s attention. They received neither relief nor compensation.
This is an excerpt from ‘Faith and Fury: COVID Dispatches from India’s Hinterlands’, published in February, 2026 by Westland Non-Fiction.