Healthcare Infrastructure
The Indian healthcare industry is growing at a rapid pace and is expected to become a US$280 billion industry by 2020.
Rising income levels and a growing elderly population are all factors that are driving this growth. In addition, changing demographics, disease profiles and the shift from chronic to lifestyle diseases in the country has led to increased spending on healthcare delivery.
In order to meet manpower shortages and reach world standards India would require investments of up to $20 billion over the next 5 years.
India's public health delivery infrastructure is characterised by an overly bureaucratic legal and regulatory framework that fails to protect the interests of vulnerable groups or generate the trust of providers or the public; this failure could be addressed by India's Ministries of Health through active inclusion of a range of stakeholders to monitor and advise on the use of public and private health care providers.
Apart from the public healtcare infrastructure, most of private investments in healthcare have been concentrated around large metropolitan cities. 70% of India's hinterland has very little health infrastructure, manpower, resources or services. Due to this, it is estimated that 3.3% of India's population falls below the poverty line every year due to Catastrophic Out Of Pocket Expenditure on Healthcare. With investments now being attracted to rural and semi rural areas, also because of introduction of social health insurances schemes, the scenario may change. An example of this trend is Glocal Healthcare Systems, a company backed by marquee private equity funds like Sequoia capital and Elevar Equity, which is bucking the trend and setting up very modern protocolised paperless hospitals in tier3 - tier4 towns. The model of secondary healthcare being provided by private hospitals and being paid by social health insurances scheme has been so successful that this particular entity is setting up another 50 hospitals by 2014. It is not just Glocal Healthcare but other organisations are also jumping into the fray..
Read more about this topic: Health In India