In 1979, a 38-year-old man, a young father of two toddlers, died in a Chennai nursing home. He needed a coronary bypass surgery. Though a routine surgery in the West, it was non-existent in India then. The price tag – $50,000 for the flight to Texas and the surgery that could save his life – was far beyond his reach.
For Dr Prathap C. Reddy, this was the breaking point. For years, this US-trained cardiologist had been writing referrals to patients to fly to America for an open-heart surgery. But watching a young father die simply because of financial constraints and lack of facilities where he stayed transformed his career.
He realised the problem was not his patients’ bank balance but the lack of relevant health care infrastructure in India that could help save many like him. He was going to build a hospital that did. Overcoming fierce scepticism from peers who called him “crazy” and enduring a four-year battle against bureaucratic red tape, Reddy opened Apollo Hospitals in Chennai in 1983.
Today the group runs dozens of hospitals with over 10,400 beds, treats patients from more than 120 countries, and is an important reason why open-heart surgery in India now costs a fraction of what it does almost anywhere else in the world.
Two villages, ten kilometres apart
Reddy was born on February 5, 1933, in Aragonda, a village in what was then the Madras Presidency. Today, it is part of the Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh. His father’s village and his mother’s were about ten kilometres apart.
He studied medicine at Stanley Medical College in Chennai and then left the country for better opportunities. After a short stretch in the UK, he spent more than nine years in the United States. This included a fellowship at Massachusetts General in Boston, then years of practice and research in Springfield, Missouri. By 1971, Reddy was a trained cardiologist with a promising career ahead in the US.
The letter that ended a lucrative U.S. career
However, a letter changed all of that. Responding to Reddy’s many letters detailing the training, the recognition, and the life in the US, his father wrote back with one question – what good was any of that doing for the people back home? His father didn’t ask him to come back, but Reddy and his wife, Sucharitha, read the letter and understood. They decided that they would.
His own professors of medicine in India told him he was making “a big mistake” and that he wouldn’t earn much practising at home. Reddy returned in 1971, and opened a small private nursing home in Chennai, specialising in cardiology. Patients came from across the country. But the work kept running into the same dead-end. This is because bypass surgery barely existed in India, and what little of it did happen produced poor outcomes. So Reddy spent the better part of the next few years doing what he could – writing referrals to American doctors and hoping they could afford the trip. In December 1979, when one of them couldn’t, Reddy stopped hoping and started building.
Battling the 375% tariff and bureaucratic red tape
The India of 1980 was not built for what Reddy wanted to do, and he spent the better part of the next three years finding that out the hard way.
His original plan was a facility just for cardiac procedures. It widened almost immediately; the heart, he reasoned, was only a part of the body, so the hospital would treat all of it. His daughter Suneeta, still a schoolgirl at the time, suggested naming it after Apollo, the Greek god of healing. Reddy liked it and registered the name. That was the easy part.
Under India’s Land Ceiling Act, hospitals weren’t even eligible to buy the three or four acres that he needed. Getting the land cleared took close to two years, with the state’s Chief Minister adding further delay along the way. The medical equipment he wanted to import was taxed as a luxury item, at 375%. And hospitals, at the time, simply weren’t allowed to register as companies or raise money from the public, which meant Reddy’s entire funding plan was, on paper, illegal before he’d raised a rupee.
Prime Minister Meetings: How one man’s resolve transformed India’s healthcare policy
So he went to the very top. Reddy got a meeting with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and told her plainly that in India, only the rich and the powerful could access good healthcare. It landed perfectly because Gandhi was busy looking for ways to reverse the brain drain among Indian professionals. While most were leaving for the West, here was one who’d come back and was trying to build something real. Within five days of meeting the PM, the customs duty had been cut to zero, cleared through Cabinet Secretary Krishna Rao and the Health Secretary, in exchange for Apollo agreeing to treat a share of patients for free.
The corporate registration problem took longer, partly because the government changed before Reddy could get it sorted. It was Pranab Mukherjee, then Finance Minister, who eventually pushed the approval through. Apollo was allowed to borrow half its financing from an Indian bank and the other half through a foreign exchange loan, an arrangement made specially for a hospital that wasn’t technically supposed to be borrowing like this at all.
Even that nearly fell apart when a newly appointed Deputy Governor at the RBI, under then-Governor Manmohan Singh, baulked at signing off the credit. It got resolved under deadline pressure, with help from the Minister for Civil Aviation and a late-night meeting with the Finance Minister.
After this, Reddy had to go about the actual business of raising money. Investment bankers in Bombay called the idea of listing a hospital “crazy.” One of them, however, visited the site anyway, was won over by what he saw, and personally underwrote Apollo’s first share issue in December 1982.
“One family, not a team”
Apollo Hospitals opened in Chennai on September 18, 1983, with 150 beds, inaugurated by the President of India, Giani Zail Singh. Reddy had originally wanted Indira Gandhi to do the honours; she turned him down, telling him everyone already gave her enough credit, and suggested the President instead. Reddy didn’t know Zail Singh personally and had to arrange the meeting through the President’s secretary.
The first major surgery performed at the new hospital was closing a hole in a child’s heart, the kind of case Reddy had spent three years fighting the government to be able to treat.
The Prime Minister who shared his vision
After Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Reddy went to see her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, to pay his condolences. What followed was a working relationship unlike anything Reddy had with the government before. Rajiv Gandhi told him, personally, to stop addressing him as “sir.”
Ahead of one budget, Reddy wrote to Rajiv Gandhi with three requests: let hospitals raise funding like any other industry, make health insurance tax-exempt so more people would buy it, and stop taxing employees on healthcare their employers paid for. All three became law around 1986.
ICICI became the first institution to fund a hospital under the new rules, financing Apollo’s Hyderabad hospital in about four weeks. The insurance exemption, which started at Rs 10,000 under Section 80D, has been revised many times upward since and today runs as high as Rs 100,000 depending on a taxpayer’s age and family. Of everyone Reddy dealt with in government, he credits Rajiv Gandhi most for the hospital boom India has seen in the decades since.
Disrupting global healthcare: How cardiac surgery cost dropped to $2,000
When Apollo’s finance team and surgeons sat down in 1983 to price the hospital’s first cardiac surgeries, the US number in front of them was $50,000 to $60,000. They chose $3,000, which included $2,400 for the hospital and $600 for the doctors.
Thirty years on, the number had barely moved; despite roughly 180 times cumulative inflation, the same surgery cost around $2,000 by 2014, actually less than where it started. Over the same period, surgical success rates climbed from about 90% to 99%.
Apollo taking forward the Indian dream
Reddy didn’t stop at one hospital. Over the years he represented Indian healthcare through the CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM and the Indian Medical Association, and organised India’s first Future of Healthcare Conference, pulling in the Ministry of Health, the WHO, the Public Health Foundation of India, an eight-body healthcare alliance, and consulting firms like Bain, KPMG, McKinsey and PwC.
The recommendations that came out of it, built around India’s rising burden of diabetes, heart disease and cancer, were formally handed to the President of India at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Reddy’s own way of summing up the problem has stayed the same for years: healthcare, he says, is a fight between quality, cost and access, an ‘iron triangle’ where pulling one lever too hard usually strains the other two.
Some of Reddy’s proudest work has nothing to do with a hospital building at all. In Aragonda, the village connecting both his father’s and mother’s birthplaces, he started a programme called Total Health, taking responsibility for around 70,000 people “from the first breath to the last breath,” as he puts it, and piloted a rural health insurance scheme priced at one rupee a day.
Purity, patience, persistence
According to Reddy, his formula comes down to three Ps: Purity of intent, Patience, and Persistence, with purity as the one that has to come first, non-negotiably. Persistence, he says, is what anyone trying to get anything done inside India’s bureaucracy needs more than anything else. It’s hard to argue with him, given what it took to get Apollo’s doors open in the first place.
Apollo today runs out of Chennai with more than 10,400 beds, over 4,000 clinicians and roughly 1,20,000 employees, treating patients from over 120 countries a year. It has grown into pharmacies, diagnostics, clinics and health insurance, expanded to a hospital in Nairobi and an investment on Batam Island in Indonesia, and built one of the world’s first village telemedicine networks using satellite links, decades before “digital health” was a phrase anyone used.
Legacy, leadership, and the $2,000 heart surgery
Reddy co-founded the Global Association of Physicians of Indian Origin and leads the Billion Hearts Beating Foundation. He has received the Padma Bhushan, the Padma Vibhushan, and a long list of lifetime achievement awards that have kept growing well into his nineties.
His four daughters now run what he built: Dr Preetha Reddy as Executive Vice Chairperson, Dr Suneeta Reddy as Managing Director, Shobana Kamineni as Executive Chairperson of Apollo Health and Apollo Pharmacies, and Dr Sangita Reddy as Joint Managing Director.
The man Reddy lost in December 1979 doesn’t have a name in any account of this story. Just an age, a family, and a number he couldn’t reach. He dedicated the next four decades ensuring that this number kept getting smaller. The surgery that once had a $50,000 price tag and involved foreign travel now costs about $2,000 at the hospital he built. He calls the life he’s had a matter of destiny. Whatever it was, it started with a doctor who refused to write a referral letter and decided to do something meaningful for his patients and the country.
Editorial Note: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with Apollo Hospitals. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. This content is not sponsored, and FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.