Can tech solve the mass vaccination drive that India needs to adopt?

Though large logistics firms are working with the govt for vaccine delivery, for last-mile connectivity especially in the hinterlands, tech might come in handy

Krishna Khandelwal, chief business officer, Locus, is sure that his company’s approach to solving India Inc's logistics hurdles can come in handy as the country goes for mass vaccination, especially now when people over 18 years are being allowed to get the jab. 

“We do want to work with the government. We did explore last year but we could not navigate the massive maze of government structure. A few months back we wrote a whitepaper on how companies, governments, and institutions need to optimise the logistics and supply chain from storage to distribution of vaccines for it to be effective. We have shared it with some key government bodies and officials,” he added.

With the second wave of Covid-19 creating havoc in India, the need for vaccinations is being felt across the segment. This has become all the more essential with the second wave impacting rural India too.

According to a World Bank blog, vaccine delivery—including distribution and administration—comes with challenges including manufacturing delays, the availability or reliability of ultra-cold supply chains, risks of delays in vaccine shipments crossing borders, prioritisation of populations to receive vaccinations, complexity of scheduling vaccinations, ensuring the quality of vaccines, tracking recipients for follow-up, and ensuring that the majority of people are mobilised and vaccinated.

Given the anticipated scale and speed of the vaccine delivery process, digital technologies can play a critical role in supporting the planning, delivery, monitoring, and management of vaccination programmes, says the blog.

Though the government of India has stated that it is repurposing the digital platform of Universal Immunisation Programme to track the movement of stocks of Covid-19 vaccines, with the States now taking lead in procuring vaccines they will need to use technology to reach the hinterlands.

Locus is one such company that can make use of its technology for setting up an efficient supply chain network that can use the best possible routes, and solutions to make the vaccine reach its destination in the most optimal way.

Khandelwal said: “Locus makes use of algorithms to solve the most complex issue of supply chain. Our core vision has been to make every decision of every aspect of the supply chain done by using algorithms. We want to automate the supply chain decision through and through.” The company that was set up in 2015 has been successful too, with clients like Unilever, BigBasket, Nestle, Myntra, Blue Dart among others.

Giving the example of Locus in India, Khandelwal says that they have been able to solve the complexity of geo-coding for surface transport in India. “We have operations in several countries now, but India has been the toughest market with different style of writing address to the directions. To make algorithms work at 99.5 per cent of accuracy that you do in the real world was a tough job and it took us 2.5-3 years to crack the India market with precise location details,” said Khandelwal.

Translating the addresses into something a machine can understand i.e. longitude and latitude is called geo-coding. Locus built a proprietary engine that understands the context of what the person is writing in address. Locus’ route planning and optimization engine takes into consideration real world conditions. The solutions make sure that it works on ground despite all issues that are typical in India for example, manually inputted addresses is one of the major challenges that the logistics industry faces since there could be multiple ways of inputting an address which depends on person to person.

Khandelwal explains that when they plan a route, there may be multiple factors that may affect the execution of the routes on ground for example, traffic, road blocks, increased transaction time etc. But Locus’ system is flexible enough to use the real time data to incorporate those factors and make changes or inform the customer before it causes a hindrance for the client or the end user.

Though large logistics companies are working with the government for vaccine delivery, for last mile connectivity it may be a good idea to make use of technology.

Shipsy, a Gurugram-based startup, also believes that the role of logistic startups that have used technology to solve the last mile connectivity issue for corporates can have a bigger role in the roll out of vaccination. Soham Choksi, CEO and co-founder shares that though they are not working directly with the government, they have tie-ups with logistic firms who are involved in the delivery of vaccines. “We have an indirect role. We are working with corporates who want to vaccinate their employee base and we are setting up platforms for track and trace of each person that gets vaccinated,” added Choksi.

Meanwhile, the company is working with a leading NGO in managing the distribution of emergency health equipments like oxygen concentrators, BiPap machines. Shipsy has created an integrated digital platform that keeps a track of the machines that come, to where they are sent and the feedback by the user.

Shipsy was built with a vision to create a Bloomberg-like platform for supply chain management—creating the largest supply chain network by bringing all participants such as exporters, importers, third party logistics, shipping lines, banks, insurance companies on a single platform.