Vidya Viswanathan
New Delhi
DIAL 1298 from any phone in Mumbai and
Ziqitza will track one of its nearest ambulances
through the Global Positioning System (GPS) for you. A yellow air-conditioned ambulance with a
broad green and yellow chequered band fitted with
all emergency medical equipment will arrive and
take you to any city hospital. If you are caught in
traffic, you or the person who is ill will be taken
care of by a trained doctor in 
the ambulance.
Ziqitza, an NGO, runs 24 such ambulances and in
three years it plans to take the number to 70.
Acumen Fund, the organisation which was started
to fund social entrepreneurs, has invested in the
project recently.
Ziqitza, which launched the ambulance service in
April 2005, was started by five friends, who quit
cushy corporate jobs. Shaffi Mather, who brought
the four together for this project, was responsible
for the roll-out of the Reliance Webworld outlets in
his previous assignment. Mather and his friends
have taken on Ziqitza as a three-year project during which they draw no salary
and bear their own personal expenses.
Civil Society caught up with Mather to talk about how they started Ziqitza.
How did the idea of this service occur? How do you know each other?
I was a regular management graduate from the University of Pittsburg. In 2002, my mom choked in her sleep in our house in Cochin. I drove my mother like crazy to the hospital in our car. Fortunately, she survived. Ravi Krishna, one of our group members, witnessed how timely intervention by an ambulance in New York saved his mother, who had collapsed due to septic shock. Ravi, Manish Sacheti, Naresh Jain and I were students in the US, and wanted to work in India. Shwetha, our fifth partner, worked with me in an organisation here. We decided to study the ambulance system, and each of us contributed Rs 10,000 for the study.
How did you study the system andwhat was the result?
We hired some college students in Mumbai. We looked at the details of the trips of individual ambulance drivers. We informally hung around the emergency arrival area in five private and five government hospitals to see how patients arrived. Ninety per cent of the ambulance revenues came from transporting dead bodies. Less than six per cent of the emergency arrivals came in a hospital ambulance. In private hospitals they came in their own car or in the neighbour’s car. In the case of government hospitals, they came in a taxi or an auto. That is when we realised that the first Rs 1,000 or Rs 2,000 is not a problem for people to pay in urban India.
When did you launch the service? What were the hitches initially?
We decided that our service would be sustainable and world-class. Inability to pay would not be a barrier to access the service. We then worked backwards. We invested Rs 20 lakh from our own money and launched our first ambulance designed according to the London Ambulance Service (LAS) standards in April 2004 while we were still working. The ambulance was designed by Ravi and a fabricator in Chennai. We told the medical fraternity and to our surprise we got no calls. We then realised that a kick-back system operates between the ambulance system and the medical fraternity. The telephone operator, receptionist, a floor superintendent and the senior ward boy are all gate keepers. A patient requests them and they pass on the request to an operator. We aggressively marketed ourselves after that to housing societies and doctors. Pricing was our second problem. We said anyone who could afford would pay our rates. We found that even people who were going to posh hospitals like Leelavati, Jaslok or Breach Candy were not paying for the service. Either that or our drivers were pocketing the money. We launched our second ambulance in September 2004.
When did you all get into the projectfulltime?
In September 2004, I went to London on a Chevening Fellowship. I took the ambulance service as my project and worked with LAS. I spent all my time there. They were shocked that Mumbai had no ambulance service. This was instrumental in us signing an MoU with them for training. They gave us all their software processes, protocols and training material at no cost. In fact, they even gave me their ambulance service plan, part of London’s disaster management service. When I called Ravi, he told me, “when you get to Heathrow they are going to send you to Guatanamo Bay. Please don’t tell them you know me,” (laughs). This support gave us confidence. We approached Arya Omnitalk, a wireless software company in Pune and got ambulance management software developed. In March 2005, I stepped out of Reliance. I had the support of the chairman to work on this project even while I worked there. We then raised Rs 1.8 crore from family and friends.
Are your prices profitable? Do you have any other revenue sources?
We have been cash flow positive from the first year. We now have 10 of our ambulances, while 12 in Mumbai belong to associates. Another 12 are in the process of fabrication and we are going to launch our service in Kerala next month. We charge Rs 1,500 up to 20 km for the first hour if we drive somebody to a private hospital. We charge Rs 500 if we drive to a government hospital and for BPL (below poverty line) patients the service is free. About 22 to 32 per cent of patients do not pay in a month. But we cross subsidise. About 50 percent of our revenues come from the user charges. Nearly 30 per cent comes from advertising, and the remaining 20 per cent from training. We have now started training in emergency healthcare and the courses are accredited by the American Heart Association (AHA).When we first approached people for ads they asked us if we were running ambulances or formula one cars. We said ‘Formula One ambulances’. Last year our primary advertiser were the Tatas in addition to SBI, Zee and Hindustan Petroleum. This years ICICI bank offered to pay more than the Tatas. We pay all our staff market salaries now. In Kerala, we are going with a different model of raising funds. CII is helping us raise resources for 10 ambulances.
Do the Mumbai government and police recognise you?
When bird flubroke out we were stationed in Navapur for two weeks. They wanted ambulances with ventilators. We carried medicines to32,000 families in the slums post the Mumbai floods. We rescued 29 people from two railway stations after the 7/11 serial blasts in Mumbai. Our own radio service supported us in providing medical duties.
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