By Melvin Durai
It has been more than a decade since companies started testing food delivery by drone, and yet I am still waiting for my first drone-delivered bucket of biryani. If you’re wondering why I used the word “bucket,” it’s because a restaurant near my home, Hyderabad House, sells biryani by the bucket. It doesn’t come in an actual bucket, but the quantity is enough to fill a bucket — or my stomach for a week. If you have never enjoyed a bucket of biryani, you really need to put it on your bucket list. Hyderabad House is about two kilometers from my house, and I’ve often driven there to pick up biryani. But it would be really great if a drone could bring a bucket to my house. Unfortunately, the proprietors of the restaurant do not offer drone delivery, nor do they have any plans to do so, despite my offers to start a crowdfunding campaign to buy them a drone. Perhaps you are asking yourself, “Why does he need biryani by drone? Why doesn’t he just use a delivery service?” Well, as I noted in a column a few years ago, various companies, as well as media outlets, have been teasing me with the whole concept of delivery by drone. “It’s coming soon,” they’ve been trumpeting, and I’ve been patiently waiting to experience it firsthand. It has been more than eight years since Francesco’s Pizzeria made India’s first food delivery by drone in Mumbai, sending a pizza to a customer 1.5 km from the restaurant. The restaurant’s chief executive was confident that such deliveries would be routine in a few years. Since then, other companies have tested food delivery by drone, but as far as I know, none has made it routine. It doesn’t seem fair to me that I should still be waiting for food delivery by drone when some prisoners are already enjoying this service.
As the Associated Press reported, three weeks before Christmas, guards at a prison in the US state of South Carolina found a drone-dropped package of food (raw steak, crab legs and Old Bay seasoning), marijuana and cigarettes in the prison yard. “I’m guessing the inmates who were expecting the package are crabby,” said prison spokeswoman Chrysti Shain, launching her stand-up comedy career. According to the report, prison authorities also seized the drone that made the delivery, but have not yet seized the owner of the drone. I don’t think this is an isolated incident. Prisoners are getting food deliveries by drone — and I’m not. What’s even more concerning is that prisoners are getting deliveries of raw food. Do they have a secret kitchen? Perhaps they bribe a guard with marijuana and cigarettes to get access to the prison kitchen. If criminals can find a way to get crab legs by drone, why is it so hard for me to get biryani by drone?
Apparently, food companies have been unable to overcome the technical and safety challenges of getting a drone to deliver food to an individual home. And yet drones are being used in many other ways, including warfare. A military drone can drop a bomb with great precision on my house, but somehow no one is able to drop a bucket of biryani. Drones are also being used to deliver medicine in many parts of the world. In India, a World Economic Forum initiative has made thousands of deliveries of medicine by drone to remote and mountainous regions. This important initiative, called “Medicine from the Sky,” has helped keep many people healthy. I’m still waiting, however, for the important initiative called “Biryani from the Sky.”