India faces enormous challenges to growth if it fails to address its health care requirements and protect its environmental resources. Most countries face similar urgent challenges, but for India the stakes are particularly high and the responsibilities especially great—partly because of the size and complexity of the country.
What is the scale of the challenge? What plans exist to address it? What ideas and inspirations are available to help refine an appropriate response? With millions of lives at stake—human and animal—the urgency of addressing these issues cannot be overstated.
Business and management have a role to play. From large corporations to public- private partnerships, or PPPs, to entrepreneurial ventures, the role of business management in addressing the growth challenges represented by health care and the environment is becoming increasingly important.
In health care especially, the situation is immediately pressing. Already, India needs some £300 billion (about Rs22 trillion) in hospital and medical facilities for its expanding population. These must be low-cost, high-quality facilities to meet the needs of the numerous poor. Rural and other areas, currently underserved, constitute a priority, before demographic pressures result in further problems in the near future.
But quality health care requires quality health care management; medical resources must be matched by management ones—financial, operational, human—to ensure that they are properly allocated and distributed. Thus, in addition to buildings and doctors and machines and medicines, there is a management challenge in health care that must be addressed simultaneously. Indeed, without addressing it, there is little chance of meeting more immediate medical needs. This is one area where business can help achieve goals in health care and where India’s management schools, like its medical schools, have much to offer.
In environmental matters, the situation is harder to define and measure but no less urgent. Without conformity to new global and national regulations—sometimes costly at first—future crises will become devastating. Obvious examples are close by: floods in Myanmar and tidal waves in Sri Lanka. There are less obvious consequences of environmental pressures: Climate change alters weather patterns, depleting agricultural resources and output, and sending increasing numbers of migrants into cities to stress infrastructure and support systems beyond their limits.
As with health care, environmental threats must be met with environmental management. Better coordination between functional departments and across states, an increased sense of urgency to overcome short-term political exigencies, a general disaggregation of effort away from the government and towards other social forces—these are only some of the tactics requiring coordination. And a highly effective management will be required for any real hope of progress.