Mumbai, India, March 24, 2020: Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) has responded to its call-of-duty to be at the service of the nation 24×7 in our collective fight against Covid-19. RIL has already initiated multi-pronged prevention, mitigation, and ongoing support strategy that is comprehensive, sustainable, and resilient. This approach can be ramped up further to scale as required by the nation.
RIL has deployed the combined strengths of Reliance Foundation, Reliance Retail, Jio, Reliance Life Sciences, Reliance Industries, and all the 6,00,000 members of the Reliance Family on this action plan against COVID-19.
The key elements of the action plan include the following:
Reliance Foundation and RIL Hospitals:
Dedicated Covid-19 Hospital: In a short time-span of just two weeks, Sir H. N. Reliance Foundation Hospital in collaboration with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), has set up a dedicated 100 bedded centre at Seven Hills Hospital, Mumbai for patients who test positive for Covid-19. This first-of-its-kind-in-India centre is fully funded by Reliance Foundation and includes a negative pressure room that helps in preventing cross contamination and helps control infection. All beds are equipped with the required infrastructure, bio medical equipment such as ventilators, pacemakers, dialysis machine and patient monitoring devices.
Sir H. N. Reliance Foundation Hospital, a world-class healthcare institution in Mumbai, has also offered to set up special medical facilities to quarantine travellers from notified countries and suspected cases identified through contact tracing. This will quickly augment additional facilities for isolation and treatment of infected patients.
Free Meals in Various Cities: Reliance Foundation will provide free meals to people across various cities in partnership with NGOs to offer necessary livelihood relief in the current crisis situation.
Isolation Facility at Lodhivali: RIL has built a fully-equipped isolation facility in Lodhivali, Maharashtra and handed it over to the District authorities.
Reliance Life Sciences is importing additional test kits and consumables for effective testing. Our doctors and researchers are also working overtime to find a cure for this deadly virus.
Masks and Personnel Protective Suits for Health-workers: RIL is enhancing its production capacities to produce 100,000 face-masks per day and a large number of personal protective equipments (PPEs), such as suits and garments, for the nation’s health-workers to equip them further to fight the coronavirus challenge.
RIL has today announced an initial support of Rs. 5 crore to Maharashtra Chief Minister’s Relief Fund
JIO’s #CORONAHAAREGAINDIAJEETEGA INITIATIVE:
It is imperative in these times for the people of India to remain connected with friends, families, colleagues, businesses, and communities while maintaining social distance.
To ensure India remains connected, Jio has introduced the #CoronaHaaregaIndiaJeetega initiative.
This initiative will enable Indian citizens to stay safe while staying connected and productive, allowing for remote working, remote learning, remote engagement and remote care.
Jio reiterates its belief, that as a country, we are in this together – JioTogether.
World’s Leading Collaboration Platform
Jio is combining its digital capabilities with Microsoft Teams, the unified communication and collaboration hub for teamwork in Office 365, to enable individuals, students, educational and healthcare institutions to continue their professional lives while still practicing social distancing.
Health-Care At Home:
- Symptom Checker: Enables users to check their symptoms right at home to prevent unnecessary pressure on the medical system and also provides continuous real-time updates and information on the coronavirus situation.
- Jio Haptik powers MyGov Corona Helpdesk: Reliance Industries Limited’s subsidiary Jio Haptik Technologies has powered the Indian government’s new WhatsApp chatbot, called ‘MyGov Corona Helpdesk’ to help address queries around the Coronavirus outbreak and disseminate verified information. This Chatbot has been developed by Jio Haptik for the Government as per their requirement, free of cost, and updated on real-time.
- Medical consultation, right at home by connecting with physicians and doctors in real-time
- Enables simple, secure collaboration and communication with chat, video, voice, and healthcare tools in a single hub
- Communicate patient updates in real-time through connections to electronic health records, business, and office apps
Learn From Home:
- To enable students and teachers to go beyond video calling to scheduling classroom sessions, document and screen sharing and informal chat channels for real-time doubt clarification
- Providing a communications hub for all lessons in a school year, with free storage available for individuals and teams
Work From Home:
- To enable consumers to hold remote audio and video meetings, have collaborative conversations and share files
- Boost productivity with meeting recording, screen sharing and remote collaboration on documents
- One-stop solution for all communication needs, with unlimited messaging, scheduling, chat and search app capabilities
Broadband At Home
Through JioFiber, JioFi and its mobility service, Jio will enable access to world-class and dependable Internet services.
Fiber: To ensure that everyone stays connected while at home, Jio will provide Basic JioFiber broadband connectivity (10 Mbps), wherever it is geographically feasible, without any service charges, for this period. Jio will also provide home gateway routers with a minimum refundable deposit.
For all existing JioFiber subscribers, Jio will provide double data across all plans.
Mobility: Jio will provide double-data across its 4G data add-on vouchers. It will also bundle non-Jio voice calling minutes in these vouchers at no additional cost, to meet the increased need of these services. As its ongoing commitment, Jio is ensuring that its mobility services are up and running at all times with the deployment of essential teams on rotation round the clock across the country.
Free Fuel for Emergency Service Vehicles:
Reliance will provide free fuel for all Emergency Service vehicles used to transport:
Covid-19 patients (service is provided only for vehicle used for Covid-19 patients and as per list provided by Government agencies, to ensure efficient impact and withdrawal post end of pandemic) to and from quarantine and isolation facilities.
Quarantined people on the basis of lists provided by Government agencies.
Reliance Retail:
All 736 grocery stores of Reliance Retail across the country will ensure a sufficient supply of essentials, including staples, fruits and vegetables, bread, breakfast cereals and other items of daily use so that citizens need not stock up.
- Grocery stores to open longer – from 7 am to 11 pm – wherever possible
- All stores are stocked up for essentials like vegetables, staples and daily needs and will ensure there is no shortage
- Activating order and pick-up from storefront so that the consumers and store staff are not exposed. It will also ensure a lesser number of people in the store
- Activating ordering from home and delivery for senior citizens
- To ply vehicles with essential items in certain areas for sale to customers at their doorsteps during the complete lockdown
- Provide hygiene products and sanitizers at Government announced rates in Reliance Retail outlets
- All Petro Retail outlets will be open to customers to ensure there is no shortage of fuel
- All store staff are adequately trained and protected with masks and follow a strict hygiene regime
Employee Support Initiatives:
Our Reliance family of employees are our strength and source of our confidence to be able to respond effectively and continuously to the evolving coronavirus challenge.
RIL has pulled out all stops to ensure that our employees are safe and protected through this crisis:
- RIL will continue to pay contract and temporary workers, even if work has halted due to this crisis.
- For those earning below Rs. 30,000 per month, salaries will be paid twice a month to protect their cash flow and mitigate any overwhelming financial burden.
- RIL has moved most of its employees to its Work-From-Home platform except for those who are manning critical roles in maintaining the Jio network for nearly 40 crore customers and for providing an uninterrupted supply of fuel, grocery and other essential items of daily consumption.