ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s, debate and innovation around India’s health services was intense. In the case of rural (and implicitly, slum) health programmes, Indian activities contributed to the attempts of the WHO/UNICEF to embed the notion of ‘Health for All’. Yet at the same time, medical entrepreneurs saw India’s health problems in very different ways. One group set in train the creation of corporate hospitals; another group pushed forward with establishing India’s pharmaceuticals industry. In this paper I read ‘against the grain’ of three key individuals in the pharmaceuticals industry and one in corporate hospitals. Pratap Chandra Reddy (b. 1933) founded Apollo Hospitals in 1980; Yusuf Hamied (b. 1934) led Cipla for many years; Parvinder Singh (1943–1999) was key to the expansion of Ranbaxy and in 1973 Kallam Anji Reddy (1940–2013) started his entrepreneurial career, which led to the creation in 1984 of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories. Their lives illuminate how commercialisation developed in different aspects of India’s health services between the early 1980s and the 2010s.
