Manish Sisodia asked if the Supreme Court panel had ever asked a doctor what went wrong.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is playing a huge fraud by refusing to form a panel to investigate deaths due to oxygen shortage during the second Covid wave and citing a Supreme Court-appointed task force to avoid it, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said today.
He said the task force had not gone about its task in the right manner and blamed the Centre and the Prime Minister for mismanaging the pandemic earlier this year when the number of deaths reached unprecedented levels across the country.
"The central government is saying there is no need to form a committee because a task force has been formed under the order of the Supreme Court," said Mr Sisodia.
"However, the five points of the task force that is being formed are recommendations for the coming time on how oxygen will be managed...I do not think that any central government would have ever done such a big fraud."
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's Delhi government and the Centre, as represented by state Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal, have been involved in a tussle for months over the matter.
Mr Baijal has twice dismissed the state government's proposal to investigate nearly 40 such deaths reported from two city hospitals during the second Covid wave.
The Centre, however, sparked a nationwide furore last month by stating in Parliament that there had been no oxygen-related deaths in the country. It passed the responsibility to the states saying it only collates data sent by states.
Earlier, in May, a 12-member National Task Force was set up by the Supreme Court to assess the availability and distribution of medical oxygen.
"I want to request the Union Health Minister to let this matter be probed so that it can be found out who was at fault and how many people have died due to lack of oxygen," the Delhi Deputy Chief Minister said today.