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India has become pretty good at building hospitals, adding medical colleges, attracting private equity and producing health-tech. What is not yet perfected is the good old idea that healthcare should actually care for the patient.

Nobody seriously argues that children being poisoned by contaminated cough syrup is an acceptable cost of doing business. The issue is that we keep discovering the patient only after something goes catastrophically wrong. The Chhindwara tragedy, along with earlier Indian-made cough-syrup disasters in Gambia and Uzbekistan, should certainly trigger stronger manufacturing controls, audits and accountability. But reducing the problem to corporate governance is putting the dust under the carpet.

Build better systems, punish negligent promoters, strengthen audits and – voilà! – quality healthcare. If only patients were spreadsheets. India’s healthcare crisis is far more complex. It is at once a crisis of access, affordability, manpower, regulation, incentives, continuity, accountability and care. And care is the word we routinely lose somewhere between the reception desk and the billing counter.

Look at our progress in medical capacity. The number of medical colleges rose from 387 in 2014 to 731 in 2024, while medical seats more than doubled from 51,348 to 112,112. Approximately 1.32 million doctors are officially registered as of today for 1.4 billion people. But quantity is not geography. World Health Organisation (WHO) data put India’s physician density at roughly 9.18 doctors per 10,000 people, with enormous regional disparities. A doctor may be........

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