India Health Summit

It's always a bit surreal to be sitting in an amazingly nice five star hotel with glass chandeliers and intensely high security... talking about development and "helping the poor." I've been in Delhi for the past two days attending the 6th India Health Summit, whose focus this year is on "Taking Quality Healthcare to the Masses."

I attended the same summit two years ago, when I first arrived in India and was a complete wide-eyed novice about the industry (two years later, there's clearly still so much to learn!). What struck me then was how black-and-white the spectrum of healthcare seemed to be -- with government hospitals on one end and private for-profit hospitals on the other end. Any private sector initiative towards serving low-income people was under their Corporate Social Responsibility umbrella, and there was almost a defensive feeling in government officials, who felt that government hospitals just needed to be strengthened with more resources to adequately serve the nation's poor.

Two years later, there's such a strong sense that government and the private sector need to work together to truly tackle India's healthcare challenges of accessibility, affordability, and quality. You couldn't escape a discussion on PPP's (public-private partnerships) in each of the sessions.

For me, it was so refreshing to hear government officials talk about the need for change in extremely unqualified terms. Said a Cabinet Minister who directly reports to the Prime Minister of India: "Just visit one of our government hospitals and you will see the mess."

One of the most heated debates of the Summit was the Q&A regarding Preventative Health. One of the speakers had chided India for being the world's largest producer of tobacco, as well as the world's largest consumer. His point, of course, was that Indians needed to be more aware of the unhealthy decisions they make regularly, such as smoking, unhealthy eating, etc.

This sparked a fascinating debate on health versus economic growth, with delegates citing chief ministers who urge their states' farmers to grow more and more tobacco. On the one side, you had people urging a tax on tobacco similar to the West; on the other, you had people citing the importance of economic growth - reminding the audience of all the farmers in Andhra Pradesh who committed suicide due to a decrease in their tobacco yield.

It reminds me how interlinked health and poverty is -- one statistic that kept coming up was that every year, 3% of Indians are pushed below the poverty line due to health care costs. Another quite incredible statistic: nearly 50% of Indians have to travel 100 kilometers or more to access quality care. Just goes to show that accessibility is a much bigger challenge than just affordability.