A woman takes care of her husband who is suffering from COVID-19 as he waits to get admitted outside the casualty ward at Guru Teg Bahadur hospital amid the spread of the disease in New Delhi, India, on April 23, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui)

India is in the grip of a rampaging second wave of the pandemic, hitting a rate of one COVID-19 death in just under every four minutes in Delhi as the capital's underfunded health system buckles. The government has deployed military planes and trains to get oxygen from the far corners of the country to Delhi.

The crisis is also being felt in other parts of the country, with several hospitals issuing public notices that they don't have medical oxygen. Local media reported fresh cases of people dying in the cities of Jaipur and Amritsar for lack of the gas.

India surpassed the US record of more than 290,000 single-day infections anywhere in the world on Thursday, making it the global epicentre of a pandemic that is waning in many other countries.

The country of around 1.3 billion has now recorded more than 16 million cases, including nearly 190,000 deaths.