Zomato is building an in-house paramedic training programme to strengthen its ambitious 10-minute ambulance service, which is currently operational in Gurugram through its quick-commerce arm, Blinkit.
“This is one of the hardest and the most resource intensive challenges we have ever taken up. But we are not backing down,” Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, July 24.
“We started with 5 ambulances at the beginning of the year in Gurugram and currently, we have 12. From serving a small area around Golf Course Road, we have now extended the service to cover almost half of Gurugram. Until today, we have responded to 594 calls, 50% of these critical emergencies. Today, our 12 ambulances across 6 depots reach patients within 10 minutes, 83% of the time,” Goyal said.
In a key line that signals future plans, he noted: “Our team is now building an in-house paramedic training programme to raise the bar of emergency care in India.” He further said: “We’re learning. We’re committed. And we won’t stop until every single person trusts that life-saving help is only 10 minutes away.”
The service was launched by Blinkit on January 2, 2025, with a flat fee of ₹2,000 per call and ambulances equipped with essential life-saving tools, including oxygen cylinders, AEDs, stretchers, monitors, suction machines and emergency medicines.
The ambulances come staffed with a paramedic, an assistant, and a trained driver.
At the time of the launch, Blinkit CEO Albinder Dhindsa had said: “Profit is not a goal here. We will operate this service at an affordable cost for customers and invest in really solving this critical problem for the long term.”
“We aim to carefully scale this service and make it available in all major cities over the next two years,” Dhindsa had written on X.
A day after the service was launched, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal had cautioned that Blinkit must “meet the law of the land” and ensure all regulatory obligations are fulfilled while offering emergency and medical services.
In an exclusive interview with CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan on January 20, Dhindsa had shared more on the company’s broader healthcare ambitions: “We are very keen to solve the problems around pharma and access to timely access to medicine,” he said, while acknowledging that Blinkit hadn’t yet entered the online pharmacy space due to legal complexities.
“But we feel that it is a worthy cause — to try to figure out if we can do it while making sure the access to medication is available in a proper way,” he added. CNBCTV18