Hyderabad: Flipkart, India’s home-grown e-commerce market, announced on Friday its partnership with the Telangana government to lead a consortium leading the development and implementation of drone delivery of medical supplies to remote areas under the ‘Medicines from the Sky’ project ‘must lead.
As part of the consortium, Flipkart will use learning from its technology supply chain to deploy drones and deliver medical supplies. These efforts will be complemented by technologies such as geo-mapping, transportation shipping and location tracking, and so on, developed over the years by Flipkart to serve millions of customers across the country, the e-commerce giant said.
A combination of these technologies will then be used to perform Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) deliveries in remote areas of the state where road infrastructure is not conducive to rapid delivery of vaccines.
The pilot project, which is expected to take longer than six days, will be tested for the delivery of thousands of vaccines, taking into account all the safety and efficacy parameters.
“The Covid-19 a crisis has pushed the envelope in the rapid development of scalable and robust technologies, and the Medicines from the Sky project is proof of that. It’s a crucial step in leveraging cutting-edge technologies for the safety and well-being of the masses, “said Pranav Saxena, Distributed Product Manager of Flipkart.
‘We are proud to work with the Telangana Government to lead the consortium using our nuanced understanding of the supply chain and technologies that regulate the automatic transport of deliveries to meet the serious needs of citizens across the state . This pilot will be the starting point for the use of drone systems to provide health care and delivery of products in remote areas and even during disasters, ”he added.
Jayesh Ranjan, general secretary, IT and I&C of Telangana, said Telangana was a pioneer in the use of technology to improve the lives of citizens. ‘The use of drones to deliver health supplies to people in remote and inaccessible areas is a unique initiative ever undertaken in our country, and we are pleased to lead this initiative in collaboration with partners such as Flipkart. “It will help a lot to test the best technology solutions to flood future crises,” he said.
The ‘Medicine from the air’ is a project developed by the World Economic Forum and Healthnet Global Ltd that sets out the requirements for drone delivery and the evaluation of proposals. The Telangana government has adopted this framework to implement last-minute delivery drones and integrate them into the state’s healthcare supply chain.
Source: The Siasat Daily