Soon, drones to deliver COVID-19 vaccines

The Indian Council of Medical Research has invited expressions of interest from drone operators to ‘develop a delivery model’

Drones could soon be used for delivering COVID-19 vaccines in remote and hard-to-reach geographies in the country.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex medical research body, has invited expressions of interest from drone operators to “develop a delivery model” using unmanned aerial vehicles for transporting vaccines and medicines.

According to ICMR’s Head of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases, Dr. Samiran Panda, the aim is to develop a model through a pilot project which can be emulated and adopted by State governments for delivery of vaccines. The ICMR has already conducted a feasibility study in collaboration with IIT- Kanpur.

‘Smart vaccination’

“We need smart vaccination instead of mass vaccination to stem an epidemic. For this we need to focus not only on areas where the infection is intense but also in places where there are indications that the test positivity rate is still low and that if you saturate the priority groups there through innovative vaccine delivery mechanism, you can stop a surge. This is known as ring-fencing,” Dr. Panda told The Hindu.

The tender document lays down the technical specifications required, which include the ability of drones to fly “beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS)”, carry a payload of up to 4kg and cover a distance of up to 35 km.

While currently government rules permit only those drone operations that are within the visual range, the ICMR project comes at a time the Ministry of Civil Aviation has allowed 20 entities to conduct trials for long-range or “beyond visual line of sight” drone flights. These experimental flights start from June 18 and are likely to conclude by October. Based on learnings from these test flights, the government will frame guidelines for BVLOS operations. The guidelines could be finalised by March 31, 2022.

Air safety

“Once the trials are over, different entities will submit their flight data and proof of concept based on which the draft guidelines will be framed. Our task is to ensure air safety during BVLOS drone operations. This includes ensuring that the drones stick to the assigned flight path, maintain robust communication and control link and are able to withstand the vagaries of nature,” said Joint Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation, and head of the drones division, Amber Dubey.

Drone companies say that the guidelines will pave the way for drone deliveries in rural, remote and peri-urban settings to begin with, and similar operations in urban areas will take much longer. They say that drones can be used very effectively in circumventing logistical challenges in health care and enhancing capacities of primary health care centres and community health care centres at village levels, which can be connected with distribution centres where vaccines are stocked.

“When you are using this form of technology in healthcare there are clear advantages as it has a compounding effect on the entire supply chain. Speed enables on-demand delivery of these products which allows you to do routine and emergency deliveries and, at the same time, gives you a mechanism to determine the supply and demand,” says Anshul Sharma, co-founder and co-CEO, Redwing Labs. He explains, “logistics is about overcoming the access versus wastage paradox — either you stock up a lot of inventory to ensure availability which leads to wastage, or vice versa. Drones are the solution to this problem as it enables you to centralise inventory at one point and then deliver it on demand. This use case is as relevant for vaccines as it is for blood products such as platelets or plasma and cancer or prescription drugs.”

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