Healthcare for all

She walks into the room wearing her little black dress. Then she starts talking and all thoughts of a young social debutante vanish. Her face gleaming with confidence and her thoughts crystal clear, she explains her vision with great passion. 24-year-old Amritah Sandhu is not the regular NRI that you spot on college campuses or seminars. She likes to give form to her thoughts & shape to her vision. That is precisely the reason why she can be spotted in Invest India office quite regularly these days. What brings her to Invest India is her dream to start a primary health care center in tier 2 & tier 3 cities. “My motto is Sehat, Seva, Suvidha. I intend to provide preventive health care to everyone especially women in smaller cities. It is a pity that most of the big hospital chains are focusing only on Tier 1 cities. The healthcare in cities like Mukhsar & Moga of Punjab where I went for a visit is horrific. There are hospitals but no doctors to attend to the sick” explains Amritah in her thick British accent. Hearing her out makes one wonder what made Amritah so enthused about this idea? What intrigues even more than the small towns of India she has chosen for her project, is the fact that she is an Economics graduate with no medical background. But as her interview progressed we understood what drew her to medical services.

Amritah has been shuttling between Delhi & London from a very young age. Her exposure to boarding school has made her fiercely independent. So after completing her studies from SOAS she had no intentions of coming back to India. She’d do odd jobs to keep her life running but one day she realized that she was overlooking something that interests her since childhood. With her father in pharmaceuticals Industry & her uncle running a group of hospitals, Amritah’s interest in all things medical was understandable. So when her father suggested the idea of opening a chain of pharmacies she decided to be at the helm of the project and flew down to Delhi. But it was during her visits to various small towns & villages that Amritah’s idea started taking shape. “I met women who were carrying medicines in zip pouches. They didn’t know what medicines they were consuming, for all you know it could have been just chalk powder. That’s when I thought something needs to be done” explains Amritah. It was then that she decided to open primary medical centres that will have diagnostics, doctors essentially general practitioners and pharmacy under the same roof and that too in small towns of India. But Amritah needed guidance for her passionate project and that’s when her father reached out to Invest India for help.

“Invest India has given her the confidence, created a path to build infrastructure to do business in India, provided accessibility to the right people at the right place” explains Amritah’s proud father Dr. Gurpreet Sandhu. Lauding Amritah’s intent, Invest India started helping her by providing statistical data of different tier 2 & 3 cities with the health concerns in each. This helped Amritah create a road map for her health care centre, Care India. She has now opened her first Care India health care centre in Ludhiana, her ancestral city. The health center has a doctor who provides consultation at a reasonable fee of Rs 100. This way, Amritah is trying to dissuade people from potentially damaging self medication.

Invest India’s reports are now pointing the compass towards western UP, which has become the next destination in Amritah’s mission . Her next stop is to take the convenience of health care to western U.P and many more regions to come.