This isn’t yet another fancy hospital, future of medical knowledge will unfold in IISc.-Bengaluru: Subroto Bagchi

Philanthropist says underbelly of the healthcare system was starkly visible during the Covid-19 pandemic, and we run the risk of collective amnesia as we come out of it

Philanthropist couples Susmita and Subroto Bagchi, and Radha and N.S. Parthasarathy collectively donated ₹425 crore to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) to set up a postgraduate medical college and an 800-bed multi-speciality hospital on its Bengaluru campus. Less than a year ago, the Bagchis had committed ₹340 crore towards building a cancer hospital and palliative care centre in Odisha.

Mr. Bagchi, co-founder of Mindtree, in a conversation with The Hindu spoke about why health is the most important space that requires attention and how the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed his views about the term ‘lifetime’.

Excerpts from an interview:

For a nation of 1.3 billion people, we are woefully inadequate in terms of healthcare infrastructure and investment. The big part of this is not the hardware, it is the human capital mismatch. We do not have enough doctors, nurses, paramedics, hospital beds. As a result, access and equity have suffered hugely over the last many decades. The underbelly of the healthcare system was starkly visible during the Covid-19 pandemic, and we run the risk of collective amnesia as we come out of it.

The difficulty with us is that we think that the big strides in healthcare must be always the government’s job. But if we look at developed nations, great things in medical research and healthcare happened because private individuals came forward to write a cheque and had the sagacity to walk away from it. That is how Sloan Kettering (oldest and largest cancer centre in New York) happened. Harvard, Yale and Stanford and Oxford flourished because of commitment from non-government and non-institutional actors of change.

Long back, Susmita and I chose to focus on healthcare due to personal reasons. Her mother battled cancer and later dementia. My mother was blind, and my father had mental health issues. Through deeply personal experiences, deeply personal choices present themselves. That is how we decided to work on mental health, vision, cancer and ageing. We decided to set up a large cancer hospital and a palliative care centre in Odisha. This will be one of the largest cancer cure and care facilities in the country.

Sri Shankara Cancer Foundation from Bengaluru is setting up a 750-bed hospital in Bhubaneswar. Karunashraya, the hugely regarded palliative care pioneer, will set up their facility. These two will be adjacent to each other. The Odisha Government has given 20 acres of prime land to each of these institutions free of charge. With these two major projects under way, we needed to do something in Karnataka.