Bengaluru – We’re learning that the Ola foundation the philanthropic arm of ride-hailing firm Ola on Monday, said that it has partnered with online donation platform Gave India to provide consumers with oxygen concentrators for free through its app. Now the service will start rolling out in Bengaluru from this week with an initial set of 500 Oxygen concentrators.
Ola and give India will scale it up across cities with up to 10,000 concentrators in the coming weeks, consumers will be able to log into the Ola app and request an oxygen concentrator by providing a few basic details.
Well, that’s heartwarming news as far as Ola foundation is concerned, and it’s important to note that a lot of these corporates have been stepping up. We reported similar initiatives by Zomato, as well as Map My India, but Ola foundation will now be doing the same through its app. And that will, of course, be useful if you need an oxygen concentrator. This is being done of course in partnership with the online donation platform Give India.
A very, very novel gesture, but of course it comes for a price tag aggregator and innovator Ola now has put in money to buy oxygen concentrators. So what they’ve done is they are going to rent out these oxygen concentrators like a bank. So you call Ola and ask for concentrators, there will be different capacity 5 liters, 10 liters capacity concentrators.
And then you tell them For how many days you need all these through the app. And then you will get these concentrators to your house. And you keep it for as many days as you need till the patient in the house recovers, and then you later return it to them. The costs are being worked out very soon, Ola will come up with a cost. This is a big development that’s coming from the Ola hometown Bengaluru, which is gasping for breath, more than 45K to 50K cases being locked almost daily, and oxygen cylinders with short supply.
This comes at a very, very crucial time as an important business model, and Ola announces that this will be replicated in the rest of the country to in all the metropolitan cities where Ola’s presence is there. We’ll have to wait and see how things pan out very soon by the end of the day, they should be the pricing of these oxygen concentrators the rent per day that should be coming out better than buying in the black market being one to 10 times of the actual cost of these oxygen cylinders and regulators and also the oxygen concentrators which are being black marketed in the city of Bengaluru.
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