From a single sanitarium with 150 beds, Prathap Chandra Reddy, author of

Apollo Hospitals

, came India’s largest healthcare entrepreneur with over 50 hospitals in the country and abroad

intelligencer Pranay Gupte brings you the full story of Reddy’s rise from humble origins in his book, Healer Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy and the Transformation of India, published by Portfolio Penguin, New Delhi. From a single sanitarium with 150 beds, Prathap Chandra Reddy, author of Apollo Hospitals Ltd, came India’s largest healthcare entrepreneur with over 50 hospitals in the country and abroad. intelligencer Pranay Gupte brings you the full story of Redd’s rise from humble origins in his book, Healer Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy and the Transformation of India, published by Portfolio Penguin, New Delhi.

Why Dr Reddy decided to set up Apollo Hospitals:

How did Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy help transfigure India’s health care geography? The creation of Apollo was the first step, after he would returned home to India in 1970 after nearly a decade in the United States.

He lost a thirty- eight- time-old case in Madras because the man couldn’t rally the coffers for a heart bypass operation in America.He wasn’t suitable to save his own father, Raghava Reddy, who suffered from a brain haemorrhage, or his mama , who succumbed to cervical cancer. He couldn’t save his dear friend Kumara Raja Muthiah, who failed of a unforeseen heart attack. Lodged in Dr Reddy’s mind is the study that had Apollo been in actuality also, the lives of all of them could possibly have been saved. It’s a important, atavistic study, and it continues to drive him to continually search for better technologies and more sophisticated systems to ameliorate health care in India.

That study has formed in Dr Reddy a grim focus on how health care is delivered in a country of further than a billion people, utmost of them poor. He converted health care by generating wide mindfulness of a simple, sensible system- that forestallment is better than cure. He did it by erecting a system in civic and pastoral areas; further hospitals and conventions are in the channel. He did it by erecting training sodalities for nursers, and seminaries for children in pastoral areas in the belief that education about health care should be part of the class from an early stage and that maybe further scholars would want to go on to choose drug as a career in a developing country similar as India.

In the course of Dr Reddy’s thirty- time trip, he has truly converted India’s health care geography. Transformation, by description, presupposes an unknown change of paradigms in one or all of the following attributes- scale, character, kidney or value. When Apollo started in 1983, it was Dr Reddy’s belief, his seductiveness and his power to carry the platoon with him that gave life to what was basically a vision.On making affordable healthcare a reality.

He formed that vision with a deep abiding spiritual faith, and he did it with a tone- confidence that motivated hundreds to join him in a adventure that had sounded insolvable- the creation of a civil sanitarium system in the commercial sector,’I took others with me, Dr Reddy said to me’  ‘I emphasized that the true Apollo spirit is If anything that can be done in the field of drug anywhere in the world, we can do it better.’

Dr Reddy honored that India sounded well on its way to getting the world’s fourth largest frugality, after the United States, China and the European Union. Business constituencies in America and away perceived exponential growth openings in a place that Winston Churchill had formerly dismissed as a land of quacksalvers.

It can be clearly said that the vision of Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy of Aragonda has been durable. Thirty times agone , when he started Apollo Hospitals, he named it Apollo after the Greek god of drug, music, light, law and predict. moment, it has grown into one of the world’s largest similar networks. And it’s growing, both in size and in request value.

How Dr Reddy named the hospital:

One autumn in Chennai, over a mug of storming coffee with the famed prophesierD. Nagarajan in his modest two- room apartment, I heard an interesting story of how Apollo Hospitals came to be espoused as a name by Dr Reddy. He came to me relatively agitated about the name that he would just registered- Apollo Hospital Enterprises,’Nagarajan said.’ I incontinently tasted that the name wouldn’t work, and I told him that.’Dr Reddy’s face’ fell.’ What can I do now?’; he said. ‘I have formerly registered that name. Nagarajan did some quick numerological computations.

Brand it & quot; “Apollo Hospitals” ,’he told Dr Reddy’; Add an ” s” to Hospital. You’ll see how your business will grow into numerous hospitals.’And so Apollo Hospital came Apollo Hospitals. That was three times before the first Apollo installation was inaugurated in Madras in 1983. Dr Reddy’s woman , Sucharitha, told me independently that well before her hubby established Apollo, Nagarajan had read her hand and prognosticated that Dr Reddy would launch an enterprise that would profit millions.

Mukesh Ambani told the author about Dr Reddy:

This is what India’s leading industrialist Mukesh Ambani told me I’ve a hunch that, true to the name, Dr Reddy wanted to negotiate an Apollo- suchlike dream in the field of drug in India. How differently can one explain the fact that an enterprise that began with a single 150- bed sanitarium in Chennai in 1983 has now grown into one of the largest health care providers in Asia with over 8,500 beds at further than fifty hospitals in India and abroad? Rephrasing the notorious words of Neil Armstrong, the first astronaut to land on the moon? “That is one small step for man, one giant vault for humanity? I would say that the one small but loyal step that Dr Reddy took thirty times ago has now come a giant vault for the private sector- led world- class health care in India.

Say this for Dr Reddy as with other remarkable entrepreneurs like Dhirubhai Ambani, he had foresight, of course, and he had a compelling vision. But, far further than utmost of his coevals, he took a great threat in an assiduity at a time when everybody advised him else. When he embarked on establishing Apollo, nearly no bone – with the exception of his woman Sucharitha, and the prophesier Nagarajan- allowed that Dr Reddy would succeed.

Dr Reddy’s efforts at empowering women in Indian business:

Dr Reddy’s other exemplary achievement is women’s commission in Indian business. His four daughters? Preetha, Suneeta, Shobana and Sangita? who have helped him so adeptly in structure and running his enterprise, have shown that professionally well- good and able women can be equal to their manly counterparts in any enterprise, especially in the enterprise of health care’
Dr Reddy’s four daughters- Preetha, Suneeta, Shobana and Sangita- are all crucial directors at Apollo, and have been lauded for their bents. His ten grandchildren are decreasingly assuming leadership places. There will be durability at Apollo in offering access to high quality clinical care- and affordable care’ Where differently in the world can you get similar top- class medical treatment at similar low cost?’ Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, the billionaire Mumbai- grounded investor and financier, told me.

How Dr Reddy manages the twin jobs of being a healer and a
businessman:

Consider the changes that flowed from Dr Reddy’s enterprise.Among them India’s pathetic casualty departments gave way to clean effective exigency departments that worked round the timepiece; an organ donation bill was passed enabling corpse transplants; health insurance was introduced in India; new technology preface in health care was now getting commonplace; investments in the private sector health care assiduity grew sprucely thanks to crucial legislative changes- in substance significantly adding the reach of advanced health care and making it affordable to all across the country.

The noted champion and the alleviation behind the Isha Foundation, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, says “Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy has converted the conception of health care in India”. In numerous ways, we can define health care in India as before Apollo and after. Sitting upon similar laurels, the man himself is childlike, bouncy and joyous. His irrepressible enthusiasm at eighty is to be seen to be believed. He is a devout being and a visionary entrepreneur, a true blessing for the nation.’

A view of similar hymns, I wondered how Dr Reddy kept himself anchored to his abecedarian part as a healer;. I asked him How do you convey your capability to cases? His response; By creating in them a continuing belief that there are people- Apollo people who watch 24/7, and that there is a system that works.’

That belief is earned it isn’t fostered fluently in men and women more habituated to the unresponsiveness they encounter in numerous of India’s institutions of public service, particularly hospitals. It’s also corroborated when a medical installation provides thoughtful aftercare to cases because a author like Dr Reddy insists.

He also happens to be a completely decent man who is not impressed by his own success- he’s in fact one of the most decent and likeable numbers I’ve known in public life since I entered transnational journalism in 1968.

Whether it’s a ward boy at a sanitarium, the chief minister of one of India’s twenty- eight countries, the head of one of the country’s seven Union homes, or a visiting dignitary from overseas, Dr Reddy engages the person with an egalitarian warmth and curiosity. He’s a man of endless questions which is why it’s frequently delicate to solicit him, because he is always asking questions of his canvasser . In fact, this reversal of places can be unsettling at times for a pen.

We’re a platoon,”he told me”we are always a platoon. No bone man could have created and sustained Apollo. From Day One, our total footmark was in the veritably stylish health care that could be offered to cases and in preventative health care. It all happened because we simply did not give up, no matter what the obstacles were. currently, of course, there are numerous others in the private- sector health care assiduity. We aren’t Massachusetts General, or Sloan-Kettering, or Johns Hopkins or Mayo Cli.