As drones continue to become more and more ubiquitous in daily life, one of their most useful applications appears to be making good on its promise. Search and rescue drones have been saving lives for a number of years now, being employed by organizations such as the Red Cross, mountain rescue teams and even inner city police forces, in the hope of locating and getting help to those who go missing.
One of the most recent organizations to make use of drones in this way is Nepal’s National Innovation Center (NIC), and it’s a decision to which 60 year-old Om Bahadur Purja owes a great deal. The Nepali laborer and father of three found himself stranded, four hours away from medical help, when he sprained his ankle in the isolated Himalayan settlement of Ramche. Whereas, until now, he would have had to hobble, or be carried to, the closest medical facility, Purja was able to receive treatment on site. NIC’s Himalayan delivered the basic medicines and equipment in a short space of time – an achievement the organization hopes to replicate throughout the country’s remote, mountainous villages, where healthcare facilities are practically non-existent. Such communities can wait months for essential medical care to arrive, as the country struggles to cope with fewer than one doctor per 10,000 people.
The project was the inspiration of a former teacher, Mahabir Pun, who made awed the country over a decade ago by successfully providing the most inaccessible regions, such as Ramche, with
internet coverage. This feat won him the Ramon Magsaysay Prize, seen by many as Asia’s Nobel Prize. The Himalayan drone is the next stage for Pun’s NIC in improving basic living standards in such areas, which have hereunto relied on traditional healers in the absence of modern medical care.
The scheme has also attracted praise for having employed local Nepali graduates to design and assemble the drone. Pun hopes that such projects will provide future employment for the country’s most able and innovative students, who are often forced to leave the country in search of meaningful work. By drawing on local talent to work in its laboratory, NIC was also able to control costs which may have otherwise become unsustainable had it been forced to recruit specialists from outside the country. Pun believes that such successes will encourage young engineers to think twice before leaving for a career abroad.
While the drone’s current range is quite limited, NIC is working on improvements which will see heavier payloads delivered over greater distances. At present it is being used to deliver supplies to those in need, such as Om Bahadur Purja, and to carry blood samples to laboratories for analysis.
Pun is not a man to be deterred by the scale of the challenge ahead. His plan to connect the country’s most far-flung villages to the internet was successful despite the fact that those villages were not even connected by road or cellphone coverage, and was achieved in the middle of a 10-year Maoist insurgency that was sweeping Nepal. Pun is presently building relationships with government officials in a bid to ease drone restrictions – a shrewd move in recognition of the fact that political obstacles can be just as difficult to overcome as geographical ones.