The Better India · 9 hours ago

‘They Had Lost Hope’: How an IIT-Backed Team Took Food & Meds to 1000+ People in Flood-Hit Assam

When floodwaters swallowed the roads and bridges of Upper Assam, leaving more than a thousand people stranded in places too shallow for boats to reach, a team from Drones Tech Lab loaded essential supplies into the air and flew them in. The company, incubated at IIT Guwahati and nearly a decade in the making, had built its technology with exactly this kind of gap in mind - the distance between people who need help and those trying to reach them. For resident Dakshina, it reframed something she had only ever associated with weddings: "This time, we saw for the first time how drones can actually help people during a disaster." What stayed with founder Ritesh Kanu was not the distances flown or the weights carried, but the faces of people who had given up: "They had actually lost hope of receiving relief because they had no access to it." There is something quietly clarifying about that image - years of engineering, tested against the simple, stubborn fact that some people are easier to forget when the water rises.