Can drones in India save lives and cut critical medicine wastage?

“If a life-saving medicine such as snake antivenom, rabies injections, or a critical medical device like a defibrillator can be delivered on time to remote areas during the golden hour, the chances of survival increase threefold. At the same time, it reduces inventory costs and the need to maintain refrigerated units in regions where the electricity supply is neither constant nor reliable. These are expensive devices that often end up being stored in non-maintainable conditions and wasted. Instead, they can be kept safely at a district health centre and dispatched by drones within minutes to neighbouring villages—whenever and wherever required—even in remote, hilly terrains or disaster-affected zones,” said Vinay MK, CEO of Amber Wings. Founded in 2019 and incubated at IIT Madras, Amber Wings operates under Ubifly Technologies, the parent company of The ePlane Company.

Reaching India’s remote regions with essential healthcare remains a critical challenge. Over 60% of the population lives in rural areas, yet most well-equipped hospitals and specialists are concentrated in cities, leaving smaller health centres under-resourced. Villages in mountainous, forested, or flood-prone areas face blocked or unreliable roads, delaying delivery of blood, vaccines, and urgent medicines. Globally, last-mile delivery is a major obstacle, with supplies often delayed, damaged, or lost. In India, 5–10% of the 30,000 government-run primary healthcare centres are nearly inaccessible due to location or disaster risk.

Experts like Vinay highlight that drones can overcome these barriers, enabling faster, reliable delivery of life-saving medicines. Success depends on public trust and strong regulatory frameworks for safe integration into healthcare logistics.

10-minute grocery vs delivering life-saving medicine?
Earlier this year, residents of Prestige Falcon City in South Bengaluru experienced drone deliveries of groceries, medicines, and essentials in just five to ten minutes, thanks to a partnership between quick-commerce giant BigBasket and drone logistics firm Skye Air Mobility. The initiative improved speed and efficiency, reducing delivery congestion, traffic, and carbon emissions. Currently, Skye Air has operations in Gurugram in Delhi NCR and Bengaluru, offering seven-minute deliveries and completing nearly 6,000 deliveries daily.

Drone experimentation in India is expanding rapidly. In 2022, Swiggy launched pilots in its Instamart operations via Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS), selecting Garuda Aerospace, Marut Dronetech, and Skye Air Mobility. That same year, Flipkart Health ran a 15-day pilot with Skye Air, transporting 3 kg payloads of medicines to partner pharmacies in Kolkata. By 2024, Blue Dart, a leading courier brand and part of DHL since 2005, joined the trend. Building on Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) trials in Hyderabad and Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) flights under Telangana’s Medicine from the Sky initiative, Blue Dart tested long-range routes, including a 104 km aerial journey, viewing drones as a pathway to faster, sustainable deliveries.

Even India Post is exploring drones. On May 16, 2025, Amber Wings conducted a pilot transporting a 9.8 kg postal bag from Karjat to Matheran in just 15 minutes—a journey that takes over 25 km by road and up to 90 minutes in monsoon conditions—highlighting drones’ potential in public logistics.

The market is growing. Globally, drones are projected to reach $54 billion by 2025, while India’s market is expected to expand from $654 million in 2024 to $1.44 billion by 2029, a 17% CAGR, with drone units rising from 10,803 to 61,393, according to a MarketsandMarkets study. Yet, consumer willingness to pay remains low: only 6% are ready to pay extra for grocery or medicine deliveries, while 87% are uninterested. Interest rises in critical applications, with 91% valuing drones for border surveillance, 79% for disaster monitoring, and 53% for transporting organs or life-saving drugs, found a LocalCircles survey.

Beyond 10-minute deliveries, drones hold transformative potential in healthcare, connecting underserved communities, reducing emergency response times, and delivering vital medicines to rural areas where most health centers lack adequate infrastructure, equipment, and trained personnel.

Where every minutes matters
Drone deliveries are increasingly becoming an integral part of India’s healthcare supply chain. In 2023, Cipla became the first major Indian pharmaceutical company to adopt drone-powered deliveries for its critical medicines—including cardiac, respiratory, and chronic therapies—in Himachal Pradesh. Partnering with Skye Air Mobility, Cipla transported medicines over nearly 50 kilometres in under 25 minutes, even in adverse weather, ensuring on-time supply to hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics in remote areas. The initiative reduced risks such as cold-chain failures, road accidents, and transport delays, while strengthening overall supply chain resilience. Cipla plans to expand drone distribution to Uttarakhand and the Northeast.

“To date, TechEagle has completed over 100,000 healthcare consignments, including more than 10,000 cold-chain shipments with zero reported failures in temperature compliance.”

Vikram Singh, TechEagle

In February 2025, Apollo Hospitals collaborated with TechEagle to launch a diagnostic drone delivery service for liquid biopsy samples. Previously taking hours, the delivery now takes just ten minutes.

According to TechEagle’s Founder and CEO, Vikram Singh, “Drones are no longer experimental. They have become an operational backbone of India’s healthcare supply chain. In terrains where it takes four to six hours by road to reach a Primary Health Centre (PHC) or a Community Health Centre (CHC), TechEagle’s Beyond Visual Line of Sight flights now complete the same journey in twenty to thirty minutes.”

He also pointed to the challenges of cold-chain failures, citing WHO and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare estimates that India loses nearly 20% of vaccines and 25% of temperature-sensitive medicines annually due to delays and broken supply chains. Singh said, “Reliable aerial corridors remove geography as a barrier. District hospitals can serve dozens of PHCs and CHCs on fixed BVLOS routes with predictable delivery times, auditable data logs, and assured cold-chain compliance.”

However, regulatory challenges remain a significant consideration, especially in urban ‘red zones’ requiring special permissions. Vinay of Amber Wings highlighted the potential of “urban drone corridors” with regulatory green lanes for type-certified drones to streamline operations. He noted that Amber Wings’ VTOL drones can operate in small areas, but proper regulations regarding landing and takeoff zones, maintained by property owners, are essential.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has also pioneered drone applications for healthcare, conducting a study on aerial transport of corneas and amniotic membrane grafts in collaboration with AIIMS New Delhi and Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital, supported by the Ministry of Civil Aviation. In Sonipat and Jhajjar, Haryana, a drone carried corneal tissue from Dr. Shroff’s Sonipat centre to the National Cancer Institute at AIIMS Jhajjar and then to AIIMS New Delhi. The 2–2.5-hour road journey was reduced to 40 minutes, while maintaining specimen integrity. As stated in an official release from ICMR, this initiative enhances patient access, ensures timely transplants, and reduces pressure on tertiary hospitals.

Similarly, the Ministry of Civil Aviation mentioned in an official release that the collaboration demonstrates India’s capability to leverage drones for timely medical delivery in challenging geographies and serves as a model for scalable, tech-enabled healthcare logistics. AIIMS New Delhi highlighted the potential for drone-based transport to ensure equitable access to vision-restoring surgeries and other critical medical services, particularly in underserved areas.

Through ICMR’s i-DRONE initiative, drones have already proven their value in North East India (Covid-19 and UIP vaccines, medications, and surgical supplies), Himachal Pradesh (medicines and samples in high-altitude and sub-zero conditions), Karnataka (intraoperative oncosurgical samples), Telangana (TB sputum samples), and the NCR (blood bags and components). The cornea study builds on this momentum, creating a foundation for the routine deployment of drones in healthcare supply chains.

Highlighting the company’s global standing, Singh added: “Globally, companies like Zipline, Wing, Amazon Prime Air, and Matternet have demonstrated short-range or controlled-environment deliveries. TechEagle stands apart by providing continuous BVLOS operations day and night across the world’s most challenging conditions. Our flights operate in Himalayan altitudes, dense forests, deserts, flood-prone plains, and through heavy monsoons. We have shown that aerial supply chains can replace conventional road logistics at scale and deliver at costs below one US dollar per shipment.”

Driving India’s healthcare drone revolution
Highlighting strong government support, Singh mentioned, “Under the Health Systems Strengthening Project, with backing from the World Bank and the Government of Meghalaya, TechEagle established the country’s first state-integrated drone healthcare network. Covering nearly half the state, this grid reduced delivery times from four to six hours by road to under thirty minutes. In the first six months, medicine stock-outs at primary health centres (PHCs) fell by over 30%, and diagnostic turnaround improved by two to three days, even during monsoon-related road disruptions.”

He mentioned that TechEagle transports critical pharmaceuticals—including antibiotics, insulin, oncology, and emergency-care drugs—as well as diagnostic samples, lab kits, PPE, and surgical consumables. Temperature-sensitive items such as vaccines, plasma, and insulin are maintained at 2–8°C or 15–25°C using proprietary CargoPod containers validated with phase-change materials and equipped with calibrated data loggers. Singh noted, “To date, TechEagle has completed over 100,000 healthcare consignments, including more than 10,000 cold-chain shipments with zero reported failures in temperature compliance.”

Cold-chain challenges, including high ambient heat, payload weight, and human handling, are mitigated through optimised pack-outs, pre-conditioning, and strict scan-in/scan-out protocols. Across thousands of missions, temperature deviations remained under one degree Celsius in over 95% of flights.

Beyond Meghalaya, TechEagle operates BVLOS corridors across India. In Delhi NCR, diagnostic flights link hospitals via micro-corridors. In Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, flights operate at high altitudes under windy conditions. In Assam, TechEagle inaugurated a 104 km BVLOS corridor with AIIMS Guwahati. Projects in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar aim to connect tertiary hospitals with PHCs and community health centres (CHCs).

Partnerships with over ten AIIMS—including Rishikesh, Bilaspur, Jodhpur, and Guwahati—enable TB medicine delivery, blood and plasma transport, and tribal healthcare access. Collaboration with Apollo Hospitals supports a ten-minute autonomous diagnostic drone service for liquid biopsies integrated with 5G.

TechEagle also flies critical payloads such as blood, plasma, and organs under strict clinical protocols. Its 100 km-class Vertiplane platforms meet ischemia windows for kidneys and livers, addressing logistics gaps in India’s 15,000 annual organ transplants.

The network serves over one million people, completing more than one million kilometres of BVLOS flights and over 100,000 consignments. Singh emphasised, “If scaled nationally, these networks could save more than 200,000 rural lives annually.”

Operating over 95% of India’s healthcare drone corridors, TechEagle leads globally in BVLOS operations, certified cold-chain logistics, and state-integrated deployments, supporting PM Modi’s vision of TB Mukt Bharat, Ayushman Bharat, and Atmanirbhar Bharat, added the TechEagle founder.

From village healthcare to air ambulances
When asked whether Amber Wings had been involved in healthcare logistics before, Vinay replied, "No, we are not directly involved. But we (Ubifly Technologies) just recently did a POC where we actively transported a defibrillator from the Mandya Institute of Medical Sciences, that is in Karnataka, to a village nearby, which was about 10 kilometres away from the centre." In this proof-of-concept, the journey took under nine minutes, a trip that would normally require 20–25 minutes, demonstrating a reduction of over 50% in critical response time.

“If a life-saving medicine such as snake antivenom, rabies injections, or a critical medical device like a defibrillator can be delivered on time to remote areas during the golden hour, the chances of survival increase threefold.”

Vinay MK, Amber Wings

Amber Wings’ drones can carry payloads of up to 65 kg while maintaining cold-chain conditions for vaccines, blood units, and pathological samples. Small insulated units sustain temperatures of 2–8°C for short durations, enabling rapid delivery across distances of up to 25 km. The drones operate autonomously or manually, with predefined flight paths approved for Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations. Vinay also highlighted the potential of “urban drone corridors,” regulatory green lanes that would streamline approvals, enable continuous drone traffic, and support both urban and rural healthcare needs. Current operational costs are around ₹5–10 per km for critical units, with expected reductions as production scales and regulations mature. Beyond last-mile logistics, drones could also serve mid-mile operations by transporting aggregated batches.

Alongside drones, India is seeing rapid adoption of eVTOL (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft for emergency medical transport. The ePlane Company has signed an MoU with the International Critical-care Air Transfer Team (ICATT) to provide 788 eVTOL air ambulances worth over $1 billion. These aircraft, capable of rooftop take-offs and landings, are seven times faster than road transport, allowing rapid access to rural or accident-prone areas.

Since its founding in 2017, ICATT has completed over 2,300 critical patient airlifts and now plans to deploy at least one eVTOL in every district. Moreover, the ePlane Company, which also incubates Amber Wings, develops manned eVTOL aircraft for air ambulances and air taxis, while Amber Wings focuses on unmanned drones for logistics, inspection, and healthcare. With $14 million raised in Series B funding in 2024, the company plans to launch commercial air taxis in 2026, expanding India’s aerial mobility ecosystem.

As Drones and eVTOL air ambulances are bridging healthcare gaps in remote regions, reducing delivery times and preserving cold-chain integrity, India is clearly emerging as a global leader in scalable, reliable and cost-effective medical drone logistics.