After diverting oxygen for medical purposes, JSW Steel plans to set up a 1,000-bed make-shift Covid hospital in Billari, adjacent to its township.
The company is also laying a 5 km-long dedicated pipeline from its steel plant at Vijayanagar to supply oxygen directly to the patients admitted in the new hospital that is being built.
The hospital is expected to be up and running by May 15.
The hospital being built by JSW Steel will come up on surplus land attached to the government school and will be managed by the district administration, sources said.
Sajjan Jindal, Chairman, JSW Group, said: “If the oxygen in such huge quantities cannot be taken to the patients, we must bring the patients closest to the oxygen source.”
The laying of pipeline will eliminate the dependency on cryogenic tankers to transport liquid oxygen to the hospital. The liquid oxygen is then converted into a gaseous form before using it for medical purposes. The pipeline will also do away with the process of converting gaseous oxygen into liquid form and storing it in tankers.
Earlier, Tata Group said it will be importing 24 cryogenic containers through special chartered flights to meet the current oxygen crisis caused by Covid-19 across the country.
Incidentally, JSW Steel converted the new multi-speciality Jindal Sanjeevani Hospital inaugurated recently near its Dolvi unit in Maharashtra into a Covid hospital.