Medicine from the sky project to be launched in Bhadradri Kothagudem

Hyderabad: After the successful tries delivering vaccines and medicines through drones, Telangana Government is now getting ready to launch it in a real life scenario in Bhadradri Kothagudem . The forest cover and difficult terrains make road transport of the medical essentials a time consuming exercise. The key advantages of using a drone in this […]

Hyderabad: After the successful tries delivering vaccines and medicines through drones, Telangana Government is now getting ready to launch it in a real life scenario in Bhadradri Kothagudem .

The forest cover and difficult terrains make road transport of the medical essentials a time consuming exercise. The key advantages of using a drone in this district will be faster delivery of medical essentials, be able to reach out to remote places and also ensure that temperatures are controlled during their transit.

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Telangana had done the trail runs of using drones to deliver medicines and vaccines in September last year at Vikarabad, about 75 km from Hyderabad. Multiple players were part of the Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone trail run under Telangana’s Medicine-from-the-sky project.

Telangana for the first time in India demonstrated the medical uses of drones. The consortia that participated in the demonstrations comprised drone as well as logistics companies. The man-less flights were controlled remotely through a control centre. The flights covered a distance of about 3 km in about seven minutes in Vikarabad. They flew at an altitude of 400 m above the ground level and carried a payload of 1.5 kg. The payload had a temperature-controlled box for maintain it at 2-8 degree centigrade. The journey was tracked to ensure its safety.

“The Medicine-from-the-sky project of Telangana is ready for implementation in real time basis. The trials done in Vikarabad area serve as the proof of concept. Now, we want to ahead with actual deliveries. A few districts were shortlisted for the launch of this project and we decided to start with Bhadradri Kothagudem. We will use drones to actually deliver vaccines, medicines and this will be integrated with the supplychain. We expect this to go live in a month or two,” Emerging Technologies Director Rama Devi Lanka told Telangana Today.

The trials were for the delivery for vaccines but the larger plan was to use the system to delivery medicines and blood among other things. Drone deliveries have a potential to revolutionise the e-commerce, healthcare and disaster response sectors as they increase the efficiency of last mile deliveries in terms of speed and accuracy through precision landing and delivery.

“The Government now got an understanding that temperature controlled delivery of medical essentials is possible through drones. Now, the effort is to use in real life scenarios. In the demo dry, we sent vaccines and blood from an area hospital to a primary and community health centre. The flight time taken was 42 min compared to more than two hours on road,” said a city-based startup that took part in the demonstrations held last year.

Yesterday’s Budget laid a special emphasis on drones-as-a- service for solving societal problems. It is identified as a sunrise sector that has scope to create employment opportunities.