India’s startup ecosystem can often be a pretty competitive place, but every now and then there can be a launch that brings people from different industries and verticals together.
India’s entrepreneurs have lauded Blinkit’s move to launch 10-minute ambulance services. Blinkit had yesterday announced a pilot where it would provide ambulances to users in 10 minutes in Gurugram, and said that the service would be extended to all major cities in India in two years. This met to the approval of India’s startup ecosystem, with many top entrepreneurs congratulating the company for the move.
“Congratulations Albi ! Very well thought-out use case. Expecting it to become fully commercially successful and solve the ambulance issue in many more cities,” Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said.
“Finally, the most critical 10-min delivery we absolutely needed. An ambulance. Super work Albinder,” wrote Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl.
“Congratulations Albinder on making this happen. Great initiative by BlinkIt,” wrote Dhan founder Pravin Jadhav.
“Amazing stuff. Congratulations and all the best to the team,” wrote Atomberg founder Arindam Paul.
Entrepreneurs too lauded the move. Zomato’s early backer Sanjiv Bikhchandani called it a “great initiative”. And the ambulance service made waves outside India as well. OnePlus founder Carl Pei said “Insanely great. Impressed!
Much of the praise for Blinkit’s move is well deserved. When Blinkit had launched 10-minute deliveries, and then followed it up with delivering all manner of products in 10 minutes, it had led many to complain that while it was now possible to get shoes and chocolates in 10 minutes, critical services such as ambulances took much longer to arrive. Blinkit seems to have listened to this criticism, and gone ahead and launched 10-minute ambulance deliveries of its own. It remains to be seen how Blinkit’s 10-minute ambulance delivery experiment fares, and whether the company is able to scale it to all parts of India as it envisions, but the fact that a private company is looking to do something that governments haven’t been able to for ages should inspire entrepreneurs of all kinds to just roll up their sleeves and look to fix problems they see around them.