When our doctors world’s best, when half a billion have health insurance

In a short period of time, I could see the entire industry change as professionals like us started demanding things and the industry started supplying them.

I understand it is difficult for people to believe but I am proud to say that today, certain materials used in heart surgery made by Indian companies are sold at a slightly higher price than their competitors from the West. And we Indians prefer to use these materials not because they are Made in India but because they are better, they are the best.

Where do we see high-tech healthcare leading to in a country like India? Are we anywhere close to the largest and the best in the world or do we have a chance? The answer is simple. Within the next 10 years, India will have the best mass healthcare programme in the world. Every procedure on the human body will be done in a different manner and how it will be done will be defined by a doctor in India—and these changes are not going to take a lifetime.

They will happen within 10 years. All the ingredients for this major transformation are already in place; it’s just a matter of time before somebody puts all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together and comes up with an end product.

India trains close to 20,000 doctors a year. A state called Karnataka has over 600 nursing schools. There are streets in Mangalore which have one or two medical colleges and half a dozen physiotherapy and pharmacy schools. All these are going to pay rich dividends to the healthcare delivery system.

Healthcare is an interaction between man and machine. The scarce commodity in healthcare is technically-skilled people which we produce in abandon and that’s our asset.

Our only missing link was the paying capacity of poor patients. But with the experience of ‘‘Yeshasvini micro health scheme’’ launched by the Karnataka State Cooperative Societies in association with our organization and the Family Health Plan solved that problem.

So we now know that with a modest amount of Rs 5 a month, we can provide wonderful healthcare, as shown by Yeshasvini which covers the healthcare of 2.5 million farmers for just five rupees a month.

Now this scheme is in the process of being launched in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and various other States. Once poor people realize that just as they pay for rice, kerosene, and milk, they also have to pay a tiny amount every month for healthcare, the problem of healthcare delivery in this country will be solved.

Healthcare is one of the largest employment generators for people coming from the lower socio-economic strata. The National Health Services of the United Kingdom—of which I was once an employee—is the third-largest employer in the world after the Chinese Army and our Indian Railways.

Just for taking care of a few million people’s health in the United Kingdom, they have hired the third-largest organized work force. You think about a situation where half of our country’s population carry a smart card of micro-health insurance and we are talking about employment for, perhaps, the largest organized work force in the world. For, investment in healthcare not only creates a healthy nation but also creates millions of job opportunities.