Our goal is to make sure medical oxygen reaches those who need it the most, as quickly as possible. We are using a triaging system that involves specific local hospitals operating in low-income communities across India to identify patients in greatest clinical & economic need. Eligible patients are identified immediately and are able to pick up oxygen cylinders and concentrators at zero cost, but against a fully-refundable deposit to ensure that these are returned.  

Providing medical oxygen cylinders will help:

• Take care of patients at home without the need for hospital admission. 
• Help hospitals with their medical oxygen supply which is currently unreliable. 
• Enable turnover of beds to allow new patients to be admitted. One reason hospitals are not able to discharge patients is because they have no medical oxygen support at home. This would allow many more patients to be served.  

We have established supply chains to procure cylinders and have 40,000 cylinders on their way to India. India has ample production capacity of oxygen, but no way to transport it from the sites that make it to patients who need it. The problem we are solving is this last-mile transportation.

Your funds support the purchase of cylinders and concentrators, setting up oxygen desks at hospitals, and transportation costs. For now, the oxygen cylinders are being provided for free, but that could change over time. Everyone (except for those manning help desks) working on this campaign is an unpaid volunteer.

The complete list of hospitals will be on our website shortly. We are not working with nursing agencies as of now, but that could change as the ground situation evolves.

We are currently operating in Delhi & Kolkata and will be expanding to Chandigarh, Ranchi, Guwahati, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Additional cities and towns will be added over time.

OxygenForIndia is a volunteer-run campaign that was started on April 25, 2021. We started this initiative because of the dire situation patients are facing in India, every day. Anyone who is not infected is flooded with calls for help with beds and oxygen cylinders, and these are not available.

OxygenforIndia provides Covid patients emergency oxygen equipment for home. In the interest of making sure that patients with the highest health and economic need are given first priority, we have a triage system in place to handle oxygen cylinder and concentrator requests.

The process is as follows:

• Keep the required documents at hand (mandatory documents : doctor’s prescription on hospital letterhead, RT PCR & other reports and Aadhar card).
• Fill in the ‘request oxygen’ form.
• Wait for an approval or callback.
• Pick up an oxygen cylinder or concentrator from our oxygen desk.

Notes:

• There is no charge for services from OxygenforIndia.
• In the interest of getting our equipment back to help other patients, we charge a fully refundable deposit.
• Once your request is approved, and payment is completed online, you will have to send someone to our center to pick up your concentrator or cylinder.
• We will show them how to use the equipment. You may also refer to these guidelines on how to operate an oxygen cylinder and concentrator.
• OxygenForIndia does not guarantee being able to provide a concentrator or cylinder. Our ability to serve you depends on the availability of cylinders or concentrators.
• Please take care of our equipment so that we can help you and serve other people afterwards.
• If for some reason, you are unable to complete the form, please send the following information in a SINGLE whatsapp message to ‘9676885462’. Details to be sent in the message are Patient’s Name, Gender & Age, Patient’s Aadhar card, Doctor’s prescription, Current SPO2 level, Current CRP Level, Name of guardian, Address for delivery.

The deposit amount differs based on the type of equipment you are requesting from OxygenForIndia. The deposit payment will be made through RazorPay and the deposit will be returned to you once the cylinder or concentrator has been returned to OxygenForIndia within 72 hours.

The payment has to be made using UPI payments or using a bank account transfer.

Equipment	Deposit Amount
Oxygen Cylinder (1 Quantity)	Rs 5,000
Oxygen Cylinder (2 Quantity)	Rs 10,000
Oxygen Concentrator (1 Quantity)	Rs 15,000

You can keep the cylinder or concentrator for a maximum of FIVE days. If for any reason you need to keep this for a longer duration, please reply to your request email to ask for an extension. Our goal is to ensure that the cylinders and concentrators are being used by people who need them the most, and hence request you to return our equipment on time to help others in their time of need.

Please reach out to the OxygenForIndia team and we will find another cylinder or concentrator in our warehouse that is working so you can exchange this.

From India you can donate online on our crowdfunding platform at MILAAP. From US and all other countries, you can donate online at CDDEP’s website.

If you would like to make a wire transfer please see the details below and fill in your details here once you have made the transaction.

For donations with checks, please use the following mailing address: The Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, Inc 962 Wayne Avenue, Suite 530, Silver Spring, MD 20910-4433

Contributions from taxpayers in the US and India are fully tax exempt to the extent of the law. Please email [email protected] to request proof of donation for any contributions made through our payment partners.

We receive funds through the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP), a 501c3 organization and global research organization that has been at the forefront of COVID-19 research, including leading the largest COVID-19 contact tracing study in the world.

In India, we receive funds through the Tech4Health Foundation, a registered non-profit with 12a registration and 80g tax exemption.

In the US, if your employer uses Benevity for a corporate giving program, your donation to CDDEP is eligible for a donation match. Go to your employer’s giving site and look for “Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy”.​​
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In India, we are in the process of registering Tech4Health Foundation with Benevity. When this process is complete, if your employer uses Benevity, you will be able to request a donation match. Stay tuned.​

The National Oxygen Grid is a monitoring and coordination platform for all the medical oxygen-related demand, production, storage, and transportation across the country. The goal of the grid is to enable adequate and easy availability of oxygen across the country, both during normal times and during emergencies when the oxygen demand spikes.

• To work with the public and private sectors to facilitate and enable a regular and timely supply of oxygen nationwide.
• To build a transparent and efficient platform to map the current demand and supply chain mechanism and support in addressing key bottleneck and logistics challenges well in time.
• To enable optimal turnaround time to meet oxygen demands without increasing the benchmark cost of oxygen production and supply.
• To leverage state-of-art information technology platforms for establishing and operating a well-connected and transparent National Oxygen Grid to mitigate scarcity.

The grid will leverage existing public and private systems by adding a layer of demand and supply forecasting, coordination, and monitoring so that during times of peak demand, oxygen supply can remain regular, timely, and efficient.

The proposed oxygen grid is similar to the electricity, water, FMCG, or LPG grid in terms of basic principles for supply-demand matching, information exchange to enable planning for expected spikes. The grid will imbibe some of the best practices from each of these grids but it will have its operating model and governance that are relevant to the problem of reliable oxygen supply.

The National Oxygen Grid will work on the principles of the Graded Response Action Plan (GARP). This will include a timely forecast of demand and supply in the business-as-usual situation, pandemic peaks, and other severe situations like COVID. Based on the quantity of medical oxygen required during an acute situation, the grid will oversee that demand is fulfilled in the shortest time through arrangement from nearby oxygen surplus clusters or through a stepwise activation of alternate sources of medical oxygen (PSA plants), oxygen reserves or finally, as a last resort, through the diversion of industrial oxygen for medical use.

The grid is being envisaged as a public-private partnership leveraging the strengths and skillsets of both government and private stakeholders involved in the production and distribution of medical oxygen.

The grid is a system strengthening initiative. It aims to build on the existing oxygen ecosystem without disrupting existing private-sector markets for oxygen. Amidst the existing medical oxygen infrastructure, this grid will add a layer of coordination, monitoring, and transparency to improve the availability of oxygen both during normal periods and during periods of peak demand. Clusters will form the basic unit of this grid and at any point in time, the grid will have a visualization of clusters with oxygen deficiency and oxygen surplus. During an episode of acute oxygen demand, the grid will come up with the nearest oxygen surplus clusters and a plan for routing oxygen to deficient cluster/s.

Yes, the grid will be able to operate effectively both in normal and during an epidemic. It has been designed to respond to all situations of oxygen demand and forecast any unusual situation well in advance so that necessary arrangements can be made in time.

The grid will keep a tab on both business-as-usual situations and any pandemic situation like COVID. It will also be able to map the seasonal fluctuations in oxygen demand if any.

Yes, the grid would need to have information about all existing and new sources of medical oxygen assets to make use of them and to ensure an efficient supply of oxygen during an episode of acute oxygen demand.

On the supply side, the grid will have real-time information about medical oxygen availability at different sources and reserves. On the demand side, hospitals spread across different parts of the country would be a tedious task, hence the grid would use modeling to regularly forecast medical oxygen demand during BAU scenarios from the existing available data.

During episodes of acute medical oxygen demand such as a pandemic, the grid will operate in coordination with the concerned district/cluster level authorities. The grid will then support important stakeholders in fulfilling medical oxygen demand in the shortest possible time in an efficient manner.

At any point in time, the grid will have a visualization of all the clusters with oxygen deficiency and surplus. During an episode of acute oxygen demand, the grid will come up with the nearest oxygen surplus cluster from where oxygen can be routed to the oxygen-deficient cluster. It will also help in mapping existing oxygen assets and proposed new assets.