Telangana Launches ‘Medicine From The Sky’ Project to Deliver Medicines In Remote Areas Using Drones

Life-saving drugs, vaccines, blood and even organs for transplantation could easily be transported to remote places while saving precious time, Rama Rao said while speaking at the launch event.

Hyderabad: The Telangana government’s pilot project ‘Medicine from the Sky’ was launched on Saturday to deliver medicines to remote areas using drones. Union Minister for Civil Aviation, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Telangana’s Minister for Industries and Information Technology, K. T. Rama Rao formally launched the project at Vikarabad, making Telangana the first state to use drones to deliver medicines.

“Today we launched the ‘Medicine from the Sky’ project in Vikarabad (Telangana). Under this project, vaccines and medicines will be made available to remote areas with the help of drones,” Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said.

As per updates, drones delivered a five kg box of vaccine doses to a community health centre located three kilometres away in 10 minutes. The first sortie was carried out by a drone built by SkyAir Mobility for its Consortium partner ‘Blue Dart Express’.

Life-saving drugs, vaccines, blood and even organs for transplantation could easily be transported to remote places while saving precious time, Rama Rao said while speaking at the launch event.

#WATCH | Telangana: The 'Medicine from the Sky' project, which will help deliver medicines and vaccines to remote areas with the help of drones, was launched in Vikarabad today.

It can carry four types of boxes and each of these boxes can maintain a different temperature. pic.twitter.com/45VHSMiKPa

— ANI (@ANI) September 11, 2021

Spearheaded by the Emerging Technologies Wing of the Department of Information Technology, the ‘Medicines from the Sky’ initiative was done by Electronics and Communications in partnership with the World Economic Forum, NITI Aayog, and HealthNet Global (Apollo Hospitals).

The project entails India’s first organised ‘Beyond the Visual Line Of Sight’ (BVLOS) trials as multiple drone consortiums are participating together to establish the use-case of long range drone-based medical deliveries. This is also the first drone programme since the Union Ministry of Civil Aviation had recently liberalised its drone policy.

The launch marks the beginning of nearly a month-long continuous trials by the eight selected consortiums, that have been batched into two per week on a lottery basis. They will conduct BVLOS trials and collect the data from each flight.

Speaking on the occasion, Scindia said the Union Civil Aviation Ministry’s new drone rules have unlocked the drone industry and the innovation on the principles of trust, self-certification, and non-intrusive monitoring.

“Drones is a frontier technology that can be used to access the otherwise inaccessible areas, and thus allow equitable access to basic services like healthcare for even the farthest and remotest of areas. India is all set to become the drone hub of the world by 2030, and the potential of our innovators is only infinite,” he added.