Through innovation and pivots, these startups are helping rural India, which has little or no access to healthcare including, hospitals, doctors, diagnostics, or medicines, cope with the pandemic
About 120 km away from Imphal (Manipur) in Kamjong, M Zinghorla’s day, for the past few months, has been starting at dawn. A staff nurse at the Kamjong Community Health Center (CHC), she heads out to the centre to collect Covid-19 vaccines which she places carefully in a carrier. Then she sets off, sometimes in a vehicle, but on most days on foot, going door-to-door, immunising families in remote areas.
While the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic was limited largely to urban India, the second wave has severely hit rural India and the lack of health infrastructure has only become more evident. A recent report by SBI Research pointed out that between March and May 2021, the percentage of rural districts with Covid-19 cases across India surged from 36.8 to 48.5. And Like Zinghorla, there are a number of healthcare workers across the country, who have been struggling to treat patients due to the lack of infrastructure, availability of medication and now, lack of tests and vaccines in rural India.
Now, a handful of startups—for-profit and non-profit—are using various innovations or pivoting their models to help rural India fight Covid-19.
“Some of the areas we travel to are extremely remote, and often there aren’t decent roads, and electricity is always an issue. Earlier, this was a major issue for delivering vaccines because we had to carry large bulky ice-boxes,” recalls Zinghorla.
Over the past few months, Zinghorla and her team have switched to Manipal-based Blackfrog Technologies’ Emvólio, a solar-powered vaccine carrier with an IoT device (to track the vaccine) that can be worn like a backpack. “With this new technology we can travel to remote areas and immunise entire communities easily,” she says.
According to Ministry of Health and Welfare estimates, 25 percent of all vaccines (not just Covid-19) end up getting wasted due to temperature fluctuations. This is even more relevant in the current scenario since both Covaxin and Covishield vaccines need to be stored at a temperature between 2 and 8°C, and are freeze-sensitive—meaning storing them in ice-boxes is unsafe because the temperature often drops below 0 degrees. “Ice boxes usually end up freezing the vaccine, and one risks accidentally administering vaccines that have lost potency. Emvólio helps in reducing the economic burden of these vaccines and nullifies the chances of inefficacious vaccines being administered,” says Mayur Shetty, CEO, Blackfrog Technologies.