India's medical oxygen shortage has become so dire that a Sikh house of worship began offering free breathing sessions with shared tanks to Covid-19 patients waiting for a hospital bed.

They arrive in their cars, on foot or in three-wheeled taxis, desperate for a mask and tube attached to the precious oxygen tanks outside the gurdwara in a neighborhood outside the capital, New Delhi.

After having largely tamed the virus last year, India is in the throes of the world's worst coronavirus surge and many of the country's hospitals are struggling to cope with shortages of beds, medicines and oxygen.

Scores have died in hospitals in India's capital amid suggestions that low oxygen supplies were to blame.

Doctors have taken to social media to beg public authorities to get them resupplied, and the government has mobilised to bring oxygen supplies by train, plane and truck.

Header image: A worker of a wholesale supplier unloads medical oxygen cylinders from a truck that are to be transported to hospitals in New Delhi on April 24. — AFP