From drones to cold storage, the CEO of SpiceHealth has laid out some elaborate plans, apart from making testing cheaper
Image: Madhu Kapparath
In October this year, eight months into her job as an analyst with consultancy firm McKinsey in New Delhi, Avani Singh decided to call it quits.
The 24-year-old daughter of Ajay Singh, the chairman of India’s second-largest airline, SpiceJet, had begun working there shortly before Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown in March. Of course, the lockdown hurt her family business, perhaps more severely than many others.
As airline movement came to a standstill, Ajay Singh had to quickly pivot his business to undertake more cargo operations in an attempt to keep the airline afloat. Since then, SpiceJet has begun to return to normalcy, with air travel seeing some recovery in the past few months and the Gurugram-headquartered company strengthening its position as one of India’s largest cargo operators.
“While I was working from home, it became jarringly obvious that the pandemic wasn't going anywhere, anytime soon,” Avani told Forbes India. “Cases were rising, and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of government officials including the health minister of Delhi. Many of them had voiced their thoughts on how testing had reached a saturation point, and there just weren’t enough RTPCR tests to go around.”
Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests are considered the most effective in detecting the coronavirus in human cells. Delhi, meanwhile, is India’s sixth-worst city in terms of Covid-19 cases and has so far recorded over 600,000 cases, with over 10,000 people losing their lives. The national capital has seen sporadic spurts in cases since the outbreak began, with daily cases peaking at nearly 10,000 a day in November. Across India, Covid-19 cases are inching close to 10 million cases, with nearly 1.4 lakh deaths.