By Harihar Swarup
Forty years ago, when India was still a closed economy, Dr Pratap Reddy set up country’s first private corporate hospital on Greams Road, Chennai in 1983. It was a gleaming, multi-specialty space built for comfort and state-of-the-art health care— very different from the functional trust – run and missionary-run hospitals in urban India then, a world away from the rather dysfunctional, over stressed, under-staffed government hospitals that most of the rich urban middle class avoided as if they did not exist.
Apollo Hospital offered imported technology and surgeries without wait time. At the time when Indians liquidated savings and borrowed to travel abroad for complex procedures, the first Apollo offered heart surgeries at one-tenth the cost of having them done in the US.
Dr Reddy is now 90. His Apollo group encompasses over 70 hospitals. The group runs teaching such as the Apollo university Chittoor, Hyderabad and Apollo Buckingham Health Sciences campus in UK. And last year, expanded overseas, running hospitals with local partners in Uzbekistan and Bangladesh.
Private health care, meanwhile, has expanded to numerous hospital chains, an estimated 43,000 private-sector hospitals, according to latest data.. As the growing number of corporate hospitals deal with rising public distrust over inflated bills, quota for doctors, and opaque collaboration with pharmaceutical giants, the legacy of privatized health care is a mixed one. But the story of how it all began in India is intriguing. There’s tragedy, pathos, lessons passed down from parent to child. And through it all, a man still in love with the power of medicine. and its application for expanding healthcare facilities in India is Dr. P:ratap Reddy and his Apollo group.
Dr. Reddy, who remains chairman of the Apollo group, still goes to office six times a week; one of those days is reserved for a visit to the original Chennai hospital, to interact with patients, doctors, and other staff.
“God has given us extra ordinary powers, and we should use some of them”, he says. “If you have a purpose, and that purpose makes you happy, that’s all you need. It is difficult in health care, because you can’t save everyone. But if you know you’ve given it everything, you’ve not compromised on treatment or technology and you are doing better every day, that should be enough.”
Reddy was born in the village of Aragonda, in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, to a farmer and a homemaker. His mother, he says, found joy in feeding people. “Everyone who crossed our doors would be fed. I think I was brought up by great parents.” By age 24, he and Suchitra Reddy, the niece of a family friend, were married. By this point, Reddy had become the first person from his village to graduate. He studied for his MBBS in Chennai before heading for the US for a residency in the 1960s with his young wife. He went on to work at some of the country’s best hospitals, including Massachusetts General in Boston.
He was living the high life. “My father loved cars. Every time I bought a car, I would send him a picture,” Dr Reddy says. “In response on one of my birth days, he said that he and my mother admired what I am doing, but suppose you did something for the country, how would that be?”. That stirred him and he decided to return to India and build hospitals with latest facilities. (IPA Service)
