Manipal Health Enterprises is the largest hospital group in India, by number of beds and the second largest, after Apollo, by number of hospitals. It was founded by the famous Pai family of Manipal.
While we have historically had small private hospitals run by family doctors all over the country for a long time, we have also had large hospitals established by family and community trusts.
But the first large private hospital, Apollo, was opened by Dr Reddy in Chennai in 1984.
Initially, there was resistance and comment about private for-profit, corporate hospitals. But over time the idea came to be accepted. Over the last 35 years, the number of such hospitals and chains of hospitals, often backed by private equity, and then the public, have firmly established themselves as an integral part of the health care system.
What also happened during this time was that the established charitable hospitals started taking the view that they needed to start recovering their costs, particularly from those who could afford to pay. Over the same period of time, these charitable hospitals, with several notable exceptions, raised their charges for most of their patients to almost the same levels as for-profit hospitals. The only difference being that a certain number of patients are still treated free, or at highly subsidised rates, compared to the private hospital chains.
But it is still true to say that the bulk of the hospitals in the country are public hospitals, established all over the country by municipalities, state governments and the central government over the last 100-plus years.
What many do not realise is that 100 years ago the government established free schools and hospitals for the public, as did the UK and many European countries. Unfortunately, what happened, particularly just after Independence, was that our civic authorities and governments focused on industrial and economic growth and neglected the vital infrastructure of schools, colleges and hospitals, and grossly underinvested – of course, with a few notable exceptions like AIIMS in Delhi or Tata Memorial in Mumbai. The result was that year after year, they fell further and further behind. The very name public schools and hospitals came to be associated with very poor quality.
Our story this time is not about the overall healthcare facilities in the country. Or what needs to be done to fix our public hospital systems. That is a separate challenging task. But suffice it to say that globally we have seen the emergence and growth of private hospitals, alongside even the best public systems like the NHS in the UK. And our private hospital chains will grow and play an important role in healthcare and medical excellence.
For this reason, we celebrate and welcome the emergence of Manipal Hospital Enterprises, from a private equity-backed company to a full-fledged public listed company. We are confident that it will become yet another blue-chip, whose best years are yet to come.