HYDERABAD: Telangana’s ‘Medicine from the Sky’ initiative of using drones to deliver drugs and vaccines beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) will be launched as a pilot project in Vikarabad district on September 11. The launch ceremony to be organised at Vikarabad Police Parade Ground will be presided over Union Minister for Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia and attended by IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, the Joint MD of Apollo Group and the World Economic Forum.
The project received the final regulatory nod from the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) to conduct the operations. Ahead of the launch, three of the eight selected consortia — Bluedart Med Express Consortium (Skye Air), Hepicopter Consortium (Marut Drones) and CurisFly Consortium (TechEagle Innovations) have already started testing their drones via BVLOS and visual line of sight (VLOS) flights.
With the launch, the consortia will continue to further test the endurance of their drones over increasing distances and heavier payloads to establish their reliability. The initiative, being spearheaded by the Emerging Technologies Wing of the ITE&C Department in partnership with World Economic Forum, NITI Aayog and HealthNet Global (Apollo Hospitals), is the first-of-its-kind in India.