Food delivery major Swiggy will now be using the help of drones of Chennai-based start-up Garuda Aerospace to deliver grocery packages as part of its Instamart feature in Bengaluru, news agency IANS reported.
Garuda Aerospace’s Founder and CEO Agnishwar Jayaprakash told IANS, “This is a pilot project started by Swiggy. We plan to start the pilot during the first week of May.”
According to him, the drones will carry the grocery packages from the storage spaces called dark stores owned and run by sellers or from a store to a common middle point, which will be called a drone port, where the Swiggy delivery person will pick up the packet and deliver to the end customer.
The common middle point is the responsibility of Swiggy and it will give the addresses, Jayaprakashy told IANS. The drones will be piloted in two tranches, Swiggy wrote in its blog post called ‘Swiggy Bytes’. While the first tranche will occur in Bengaluru by Garuda Aerospace, and in Delhi-NCR by Skyeair Mobility.
IANS reported that the second phase will be done soon after studying the learnings from the pilot by ANRATechEagle Consortia and Marut Dronetech Pvt Ltd.
However, it is uncertain whether if Swiggy will take up expenses in case any public or private property is damaged by the drones. IANS said it is not known whether Swiggy has insisted the drone players to take out a public liability insurance policy.
In February this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had virtually inaugurated the drone manufacturing facilities of Garuda Aerospace at Manesar in Gurugram and in Chennai.
The government has not yet allowed beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations for drone deliveries. However, the Ministry of Civil Aviation has granted conditional exemption to 20 entities including Swiggy, a news website reported.
