When Nepali labourer Om Bahadur Purja sprained his leg in his remote village he would have faced a four-hour trek to the nearest medical centre – but for a pioneering scheme to bring healthcare to the Himalayas.
Instead, the 60-year-old father of three received the treatment he needed in his home village thanks to the recent arrival of a drone carrying basic medicines and equipment.
“This saved me a lot of trouble, time and money,” Purja told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from Ramche, a Himalayan village 250 km (150 miles) northwest of the Nepali capital Kathmandu.