Heart disease kills 28.6 lakh Indians every year and yet, treatment is uneven and erratic Premium

Heart disease claims 28.6 lakh lives annually in India, yet access to timely treatment remains severely inadequate, especially in rural areas.

On a cold February morning, Jassuram Khanna, a farmer from Sujau village in Chakrata in Uttarakhand, felt a tightness in his chest on his way to the market. After waiting a few minutes, he called his son Suresh to come and take him to the doctor. They hired a private car and went to the local Primary Health Centre (PHC), where the health worker checked his blood pressure and sent him to Vikasnagar, a nearby Tehsil town.

On reaching Vikasnagar’s Community Health Centre (CHC), 55 km away, they found no doctor there. Finally, at around 3 pm, they found help at the Swami Vivekanand Charitable Hospital in Dharamwala, about 70 km from their hometown. This is where Jassuram finally got an electrocardiogram (ECG) done, which indicated he had suffered a heart attack. The doctors rushed him for an angiography, where they found he had a 100% blockage in one of his heart vessels. They performed an angioplasty where a balloon was sent to the blocked heart blood vessel to widen it, and a mesh tube called a stent was placed there. The time taken from his first symptoms at 10:30 am to his first ECG was 4.5 hours, and it would be another 40 minutes before he the angioplasty procedure was done.

The ideal time that guidelines recommend for a patient with a heart attack to get an ECG and have it interpreted is 10 minutes of contact with a medical team.

Jassuram’s long journey for an ECG is typical of what patients in rural areas face.

Dr. Gayatri, illustrator, Nivarana

While poor access to healthcare in rural India is a well-known fact, does living in a city guarantee timely care? In December 2025, Usha Amin, a retired teacher, felt breathless for two consecutive days on her morning walk; she found her pulse to be 33 on her electronic BP machine (normal pulse being 60-80beats/min). Alarmed, she called her son and rushed to the nearest multispecialty hospital in Thane, which falls in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.