New Delhi: While India prepares for the Covid third wave, the heartbreaking scenes of dead bodies piling up at moratoriums during the second Covid wave and people dying due to oxygen shortage are still fresh in everyone's memory. Different state governments announced compensation for those who died due to the oxygen crisis but due to the lack of data, people have not got the support they deserved.
Now, the Delhi High Court has given its nod to the constitution of a committee to probe claims of deaths due to oxygen shortage during the COVID-19 second wave and the Kejriwal government also said it wanted the truth to come out. The Delhi government’s decision to form a high-powered committee (HPC) to look into the cases of deaths due to alleged shortage of oxygen had failed to get the lieutenant governor’s approval earlier.
Issuing a statement on Tuesday, the Kejriwal government expressed gratitude to the court for allowing them to form a probe committee. “The Delhi government has been serious about the deaths in the capital due to lack of oxygen during the Coronavirus pandemic. It wants the truth to come out in front of everyone," it said.
“Surprisingly", the Delhi government had sent a file in this regard twice to the L-G but he refused to give his nod, the statement further said. “Finally, today the court has upheld the stance of the Delhi government," it added, reported PTI.
The Delhi High Court on Tuesday said it saw no difficulty in the constitution of the high-powered committee by the AAP government to probe the deaths caused by an alleged medical oxygen shortage during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The court, dealing with a plea to operationalise the HPC, noted the Delhi government’s stand that the committee would not attribute any fault to any hospital and any compensation will be paid and absorbed by the government alone.
It further recorded that as per the Delhi government, the criteria for determining compensation will be open to scrutiny and its task would not overlap with that of a sub-group constituted by the Supreme Court on allocation and utilisation of oxygen.
The Arvind Kejriwal government has announced a compensation of Rs 5 lakh to the families of those who lost their lives due to oxygen shortage during Covid treatment. The government had formed a panel of medical experts to probe such claims and sent it for the L-G’s approval, but it did not materialise.