From e-commerce deliveries to traffic management, Gurugram takes the aerial route

Mudit Bansal experiences child-like zest watching drones deliver products in Gurugram, a city embracing drone technology for various purposes.

Every time Mudit Bansal spots a drone appear on the horizon, navigating its way through high-rises, heading towards his multi-storey apartment complex, Fresco, to make a delivery, the market strategist at a multinational IT company experiences a “child-like” zest.

“If I ever happen to see a drone up there, I stop for a few seconds to behold the spectacle. It is an amazing technology,” said Mr. Bansal, visibly excited over just having received a pack of snacks, some frozen food and a bottle of coke delivered by air.

Inside posh Nirvana Country township in Sector 50, Fresco is the first apartment complex in Gurugram to receive deliveries through air – ranging from milk and fresh vegetables in the early hours to groceries, food items and other products all through the day. The number has now gone up to over half a dozen on Golf Course, Golf Course Extension and Sohna Road, with 60 new addresses, mostly along the now-open Dwarka Expressway, soon to be added to this growing list.

Known for its glitzy offices and sprawling shopping malls, Gurugram became the first city in Haryana, and perhaps in the country, to have e-commerce products delivered through drones when Skye Air, a drone delivery tech firm, delivered a pair of spectacles and gulab jamun at Fresco last September.

But it was almost two years before this delivery in Gurugram that the long and tumultuous journey for drone deliveries in the country started on September 11, 2021, when a drone flew for over 3 km to deliver medicines in Telangana’s Vikarabad, claimed Skye Air co-founder and CEO Ankit Kumar.

This short flight marked a turning point in the history of the country’s aviation journey for deliveries through drones. “In August 2021, a new policy came into effect which removed all bottlenecks. So taking permissions, approvals, compliances and multiple other things were super-eased,” he said.

Much before the first e-commerce delivery in Gurugram, the company had started with commercial operations for delivery through drones in the healthcare sector with the governments of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Nagaland and a few more States.