Medicine From The Sky: Telangana Deploys Drones To Deliver Medicines And Vaccines

In an innovative step, the Telangana government launched the ‘Medicine From The Sky’ initiative to deliver essential medicines and vaccines using long-range drones.

Union Minister for Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia and Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao launched MedicinefromtheSky in Vikarabad, Telangana, which seeks to send vaccines and essentials to remote areas, to primary healthcare centres using drones.

The ‘Medicine From The Sky’ is an initiative spearheaded by the Emerging Technologies Wing of the IT Electronics and Communications (ITE&C) department, in partnership with World Economic Forum (WEF), NITI Aayog, and HealthNet Global.

The project entails India’s first organised Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) trials as multiple drone consortiums establish the use-case of long-range drone-based medical deliveries.

“The consortium partners are from Drone Company, logistics, UTM Service Provider and a Healthcare and Cold chain expert as partners,” Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao said.

The startup partners include Airserve, BlueDart Express, TechEagle Innovations, Dunzo, Marut Drones, Sagar Defence, Redwing Labs.