UPDATED: May 22, 2021 14:06 IST
The Bunk House Covid care centre
Lalit Kiri’s story is a rags-to-riches tale of a pharmacist who made it big supplying logistical services to Cairn Energy while it was exploring for oil in Rajasthan’s Barmer, and continued to grow after that. Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, he had been urging the state government to use ‘container bunk houses’ shipping containers that are repurposed as rooms on construction sites to set up makeshift Covid hospitals in areas without medical infrastructure.
A few weeks ago, state revenue minister Harish Chaudhary sent Kiri an urgent request to set up a Covid care centre at Sambhara, near Pachpadra using these bunkhouses, giving him just 24 hours to do so. Despite the difficulty, Kiri managed to get the job done, putting a hundred people including plumbers, electricians, landscapers and transporters as well as equipment like JCBs (diggers) on the job. “A hundred of us did not sleep for 24 hours,” he says