IIT Bombay students, alumni come up with an initiative to provide 24-hour ambulance service

IIT Bombay students and alumni have come up with around-the-clock ambulance service, to help the state in its fight against coronavirus. 

With an aim to reduce the long waiting time for an ambulance, the IIT Bombay students and alumni have come up with around-the-clock ambulance service.

In a month, they have until now attended more than 3,500 calls. They have come up with this idea, looking at the current ambulance availability situation in the state amid coronavirus outbreak.

Another issue faced by the public is the amount they have pay to avail ambulance service. The group has addressed this issue and made this ambulance available for Rs 5,000 for 5 Km with the charge increasing as per the distance after the first 5 Km. The team is also working on hiring more private ambulances under one aggregation platform, however, they said they will not commit over the prices charged by them.

People can avail of the ambulance service by dialing 8899889952, and the team assured that it will reach to them within an hour or 45 minutes.

The initiative has been named HelpNow and it has begun with five ambulances. It now offers 45 ambulances, including private ones, out of which 15 are used to address coronavirus patients.

Aditya Makkar, Shikar Agarwal, and Venkatesh Amrutwar, are the three students who have come with the initiative.

“In 2017, when my father suffered a heart attack, we struggled to get an ambulance. We had to take him in our car to the hospital. That was the time we learned that Mumbai is facing scarcity of ambulance, and so we decided to launch this service,” Makkar said.

The team got initial funding of Rs 2 lakh from the Desai Sethi Centre for Entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay. Makkar further said that he had chalked out the plan and was looking out for volunteers. As many as 24 health care workers and students came forward to join this initiative.

Read More:

• IIT Bombay develops testing method to detect asymptomatic coronavirus patients