E-commerce marketplace Flipkart has partnered with the Telangana government to lead a consortium tasked with the development and execution of drone delivery of medical supplies to remote areas under the ‘Medicines from the Sky’ project.
Technology used
As part of the consortium, Flipkart will utilise learnings from its tech-enabled supply chain to deploy drones and enable deliveries of medical supplies.
These efforts will be complemented with technologies such as geo mapping, routing of shipments, and track and trace of location, developed by Flipkart over the years in serving millions of customers across the country. A combination of these technologies will be used to conduct Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) deliveries in remote areas of the Sate, where the road infrastructure is not conducive for fast delivery of vaccines.
The pilot, which is expected to be conducted for over six days, will be tested out for delivering thousands of vaccines, while keeping in mind safety and efficiency parameters.
Rajneesh Kumar, Senior Vice-President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Flipkart, said: “The Covid-19 crisis has pushed the envelope in the rapid development of scalable and robust technologies and the Medicines from the Sky project is a testament to that. It is a decisive step in making use of technologies for the safety and wellbeing of the masses.”
“This pilot will set the premise for the utilisation of drone systems in providing healthcare and product delivery in remote areas and even during disasters,” he said.
Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, IT, Telangana, said: “Using drones to deliver healthcare supplies to people in remote and inaccessible areas is a one-of-a-kind initiative ever undertaken in our country, and we are happy to lead this initiative in collaboration with partners such as Flipkart.”