New Delhi: Drones, ultracold containers and a batch of airplanes — this is how Avani Singh, daughter of Ajay Singh, who owns India’s second largest airline SpiceJet, plans to deliver Covid-19 vaccines across India.
Avani, CEO of SpiceHealth, told ThePrint they have already been in talks with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and other government agencies.
“They are testing our drones service technology for the delivery of vaccines. We are also in talks with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for various other innovations. They are excited to quickly deploy (our technology)…” said Avani in a telephonic interview.
A 24-year-old public policy graduate from Stanford University, Avani left her job with consultancy firm McKinsey in October to take a plunge into one of the fastest-growing sectors in India — healthcare.
A graduate in psychology and economics, Avani aims to create a system of vaccine delivery “from the factory to the patients”.
“The idea is to take vaccines right from the manufacturing facilities and then provide end-to-end logistics and also administration. That’s the plan,” she said, adding that her company is actively involved in talks with the central government.
SpiceHealth, launched on 23 November by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, is developing temperature-controlled containers for storing and delivering vaccines.
“Right now, with the available technology, we can store vaccines requiring temperature till minus 40 degree Celsius to 25 degree Celsius. We are trying to get down to minus 70 to minus 80 degrees to be able to accommodate Pfizer’s vaccine,” she said.
Avani, however, refused to divulge the estimates on how many units of vaccine per day her company will be able to deliver.
“It’s too early to estimate it right now. I am sure we will have a better sense of the numbers, going forward.”
Avani also plans to work closely with SpiceJet’s cargo division, SpiceXpress, which includes a dedicated fleet of 17 aircraft, including Airbus A340, Boeing 737 and Bombardier Q400.
“We work closely with the cargo arm, which has delivered 95,000 tonnes of cargo so far, which includes a lot of medical supplies. In future also, we will work closely with them to achieve our plans on vaccine drive,” said Avani.
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‘Nothing without my dad’
Avani is “super close” to her entrepreneur father Ajay Singh, who is credited for nurturing the low-cost airline founded by him in 2005.
“I can never claim that anything I do is completely just by me or completely independent of him… It will be pretty pretentious to claim. I bounce all ideas off him and he is here for advice,” she said, explaining how her father reacted when Avani shared her idea of plunging into the healthcare business.
He has always told me that “in adversity, you always find opportunities”, she said.
“I had planned to work for a consultancy a little longer before potentially exploring SpiceJet. I told him that I am thinking of doing this in healthcare, he left me to make my own decision,” she added.
“He was actually very much convinced with the idea,” she said, adding: “Dad said, ‘you should do this if you think the idea has potential… but you must know that it’s a lot of hard work’.
“That’s it. I started doing my ground-reality check to understand from where I want to begin with,” she said.
“I started meeting people in the healthcare business, meeting top government officials, including Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan and Delhi’s Health Minister Satyender Jain.”
Finally, she decided to roll out her venture, starting with Covid-19 testing first — which was critical to India’s fight against Covid.
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From affordable flying to affordable healthcare
Avani said: “The general sense was while India is doing its best, we don’t have strong healthcare infrastructure.”
In the national capital also, the scale of testing, which was required was unavailable, and there was a major crisis in Delhi for conducting the required Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests”, she said.
As she spoke to more and more people, Avani “understood that testing was the only way to control the pandemic. We studied the market and culled two main points — the cost of testing was incredibly high, and, a lot of labs were situated in far-away places which required samples to travel longer distances”.
By the end of November, SpiceHealth started undertaking RT-PCR tests at Rs 499 — the lowest price for RT-PCR tests against Rs 2,400 that labs across the country were charging, said Avani.
“As SpiceJet is known for affordable and economical flying, the core of SpiceHealth remains the same — affordable to all.”
Presently, the company is running five Covid-19 testing laboratories in Delhi — Rajouri Garden, Chattarpur, Dwarka, Rohini and Azadpur Mandi. Five more labs are expected to be rolled out soon in the national capital.
“We hope to play a big role in the Delhi government’s testing plan, which is 90,000 every day. We have five labs already ready to be deployed apart from the five, which are already running.”
Plans to venture into genome sequencing
Avani plans to expand Covid testing facilities across India, gradually, and also wishes to enter into the business of “genome-sequencing” in India.
“I have studied in the tech capital of the world,” she said, adding that her company believes in innovation.
“We first innovated the dried swab method, which reduced testing time due to which the report can be given within just 6 hours from the time of sample collection as compared to the average 24-48 hours.”
Avani added that she is “excited about genomic sequencing”. “There is no future of healthcare without sequencing and I want to get involved in it as the next thing at SpiceHealth,” she said.
Avani foresees that her venture soon will be independent of SpiceJet.
“SpiceJet is also our own company and I did leverage our flying business wherever I could. In fact, it helped us in setting up complete IT infrastructure and managing operations,” she said, adding that “SpiceHealth is now working on becoming completely independent since SpiceHealth aims to become much bigger. SpiceHealth is an independent company in its own stride.”
Avani added that her medical venture now has over 100 employees and she is hiring more every day.
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I didn’t realise the print has also joined the godi media wagon…as a media house your job is to least verify and clarify if the person you interview is lying and not just print anything….for a company which doesn’t have a single website how did they recuit 100 employees? how did spice health a private company use the brand name of Spicejet a public company without any paying any royalties…why does government award vaccine distribution to a company that is just 4 months old and the promotor who has no experience in business…did Himani do an iota of background check or the person or company they are interviewing?
All the best