From CNG cylinders to oxygen containers, Indian expat in Dubai changes tack for COVID-19 patients back home

Dubai: Responding to the need of the hour, an Indian expat at a UAE-based free zone company has set aside producing Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) cylinders and shifted to manufacturing oxygen containers for India to help COVID-19 patients in the country.

Speaking to Gulf News, Pushkar Khurana, managing director of the company EKC International FZE, said, “We are an Indian subsidiary and as soon as we came to know about the oxygen cylinder shortage in India, we had to rise to the call of our nation and serve the needs of our country.”

Khurana said that since March, they have been exporting these cylinders in multiple containers to Port Mundra in Gujarat on the western coast of India. “We make the cylinders which are then filled with medical oxygen by Gulf-based industrial gas companies such as Emirates Industrial Gases Company (EIGC) and Gulf Cryo, and these are shipped to Port Mundra. Each container that is shipped contains about 350 cylinders of 50 litre capacity.”

Saving precious lives

In March and April, the company shipped about 6,000 oxygen cylinders and in May the number is likely to go up to 7,000.

Khurana said, “The lives of people suffering from COVID-19 are important. We look at this as a critical or emergency duty and will continue to produce oxygen cylinders for as long as India needs them. The Adani Group from Gujarat reached out to us and we immediately adapted the production to manufacturing oxygen cylinders which have a slightly different specification than CNG cylinders.”

K.N. Kutty, sales manager of the company, a subsidiary of Everest Kanto Cylinder Limited in India, said the UAE unit has been producing CNG cylinders for Natural Gas Vehicles (NGV) as well as industrial cylinders since 2002. “Over 99.9 per cent of the production is exported to Latin American countries, Mexico, USA, Egypt and some parts of South East Asia.”

The call of the home country reeling under the COVID-19 crisis now necessitated a shift.