Creating Healthy Communities
Tune in to watch Ajit Singh, Chairman, ACG, talk about creating healthy communities.
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00:43 We started in the mid-1960s.
00:47 It was a very unusual and interesting time for India.
00:51 There had been independence a few years earlier.
00:55 The first five-year plan had come out a few years before,
00:59 incidentally largely written by industrialists
01:02 with the help of the government, which never happened again.
01:06 And India was largely underdeveloped.
01:09 There was hardly any structure other than the railways,
01:12 very bad roads.
01:14 And most of industry had not yet started,
01:18 except for a few huge groups like builders and tartars
01:22 and so on.
01:25 The real growth of the medium sector industry
01:30 started when we started, in the mid-1960s.
01:34 All these well-known companies you hear of today
01:37 in pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals
01:40 more or less were born then.
01:43 Even multinationals had come into India,
01:46 but they were mostly trading.
01:49 It is the foresight of the government
01:51 and their own desire to have a larger
01:53 say in the Indian market that led them into manufacturing,
01:57 first into pharmaceutical formulations,
02:00 and then into, with the help of the government,
02:02 some bulk drugs.
02:04 Now, all the big names you hear of today--
02:07 you hear of Cadillac, Cipra, Dr. Reddy's Labs, Ranbaxy--
02:13 all began around the same time, all as very small companies.
02:18 Most of us--
02:20 I know that one or two major industrialists today
02:24 used to work for another bigger company
02:26 and would bicycle at work, very small amount of money,
02:30 and big ambitions.
02:31 So that's how the whole industry started.
02:34 And then it faced innumerable issues and problems,
02:39 partly with the infrastructure, partly with the fact
02:43 that it was less trained people and less know-how on how
02:47 to train and use people productively,
02:51 but possibly also a large contributing factor
02:55 or, in a way, the goodwill but the inexperience
02:59 of the government to understand how to help entrepreneurs
03:04 to develop industry.
03:06 I'm not sure that we entrepreneurs
03:08 did such a great job in convincing
03:11 the government of our bona fides and of how much we desire
03:15 to be part of the national effort.
03:17 Most people who went into the industry at that time
03:20 were from a trading background and therefore had
03:23 more of a trading mentality.
03:27 I want it now.
03:29 Where are my profits?
03:31 That is the most important, is the bottom line.
03:33 And it is not a question of I'm satisfied
03:37 with deferred gratification.
03:39 I'm satisfied if I get it much later.
03:42 Let me put in my effort now in many different directions,
03:46 and things will work out fine.
03:48 So it is those who look at industry that way
03:52 have survived and have blossomed,
03:54 and are taking India now to completely new frontiers,
03:58 particularly globally in the pharmaceutical industry.
04:03 It was a tough job, infrastructure and government,
04:06 for big bottlenecks, largely because of lack
04:09 of communication on all sides.
04:11 All along, the government has been
04:20 talking about improving the reach of medicines.
04:24 This is paramount in their mind.
04:26 In the cities, we are fairly looked after,
04:29 well looked after.
04:31 We have enough doctors more or less available,
04:34 though we are a very abysmally small number of doctors
04:37 in the country.
04:38 But as soon as you got out of the countryside,
04:41 there was really very little to count on,
04:43 except some herbal products and some painkillers, and so on.
04:49 The government put up these very small, almost village,
04:53 the local level health centers, which
04:56 have helped in their own way.
04:58 There's been enormous problems of discipline
05:01 and of ensuring the distribution of products down the line.
05:05 Distribution, in the last 20 years or so,
05:09 has been a major issue in this country.
05:11 Getting the medicines where they should be is still a challenge.
05:17 It's just like nutrition.
05:19 I believe there probably is enough food and enough
05:22 nutrition in the country, but it is not
05:25 reaching the poorest and it's not
05:27 reaching wherever it should be.
05:28 A pandemic like COVID-19 doesn't set new trends
05:42 or a new normal.
05:43 It simply accelerates the old normal
05:47 into what would have already happened in the next five
05:51 or 10 or 15 years.
05:53 So what would have happened anyway had to happen.
05:57 But crammed up into just one year,
05:59 and we saw all sorts of new ways of communicating,
06:03 new ways of working, and just, I think,
06:07 in a way, making a more interesting and better and more
06:11 efficient world.
06:14 So this is where we try to make sure
06:20 that things go the right way.
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06:59 Yes, of course we will eradicate malnutrition.
07:02 The point is that, you know, we want it now.
07:06 Now, please remember, in a country, a vast country like India,
07:11 with hundreds of years of malnutrition, of pandemics of various types,
07:19 of hardships that our people have been through,
07:22 things can't happen overnight.
07:26 50 years or 100 years in the history of this great country
07:30 is just a blink of an eyelid.
07:33 But we, with modern communications and Twitter and talking to each other
07:38 and a newly educated middle class, large number of younger people,
07:44 all want it to happen within five years, within 10 years.
07:48 It's not going to happen, but things can be done
07:51 to accelerate the greater spread of nutrition,
07:54 but we have to be somewhat patient.
07:56 And we have to try and make what we can of what we have.
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08:08 You know, we have to learn to live with something.
08:11 You can't avoid them.
08:14 We are now living with a pandemic.
08:17 We are not living, we are frightened of a pandemic.
08:21 What has happened, unfortunately, with COVID-19,
08:25 is I think for the first time,
08:27 for the first time that a pandemic struck this country,
08:32 we had incredible amount of communication,
08:35 incredible amount of news spreading, Twitter.
08:39 Journalists themselves were writing a lot of articles.
08:42 And I'm afraid that I think a lot of fear got created inadvertently,
08:49 but because it was hot news.
08:52 And everyone watching all this information,
08:55 and people getting sick and some people dying,
08:58 but more and more fearful.
09:01 The government, I think, has always tried to do its best,
09:04 but it's grappling with huge problems
09:06 and didn't necessarily do everything to make the people more calm.
09:16 And the journalists, I say this with respect,
09:18 a little more discipline.
09:20 So there we have a situation where never before
09:25 can so many people communicate with so many other people.
09:29 And it is quite easy to set off alarms.
09:32 Now, okay, we are calling this a pandemic right now for COVID-19.
09:37 I don't, you know, two, three hundred thousand people
09:41 have probably died very unfortunately.
09:44 But do we know how many other diseases there are,
09:48 which are also virus-based,
09:51 and which are more infectious or as infectious as COVID
09:55 with a higher death rate?
09:57 Give you an example.
09:58 Well, there's many products.
09:59 There's tuberculosis, there's SARS, there's AIDS,
10:04 there's even mumps, all viruses.
10:10 Are we concerned today that in India,
10:17 one and a half million people die every year for tuberculosis?
10:24 TB is infectious.
10:27 Are we seeing that as a pandemic?
10:30 Are we frightened that we don't want to take any action
10:33 or get to work or whatever?
10:37 No.
10:38 We feel that that pandemic is actually,
10:41 probably was an epidemic, and now it is endemic.
10:46 Endemic means it's there.
10:49 We know it's there.
10:51 We don't pay much attention to it.
10:53 We take whatever precautionary steps we can,
10:56 but we get on with life.
10:59 And that's what I believe we should be looking at doing
11:03 with this present so-called pandemic.
11:05 And I believe now with the government,
11:07 with this very rational policy of not closing down
11:11 the whole country, doing it very selectively,
11:14 bearing in mind the loss of economic output,
11:18 taxation which goes to help the poor, and most important
11:22 of all, the alarm that has created possibly more deaths
11:28 than the COVID pandemic itself.
11:33 And people have not been able to get hospital beds
11:36 for heart attacks or for cancer cures or for x-rays
11:40 because all doctors are busy with COVID.
11:43 India is a wonderful country in the sense
11:54 that people look after each other.
11:57 Neighborliness is endemic in our country,
12:01 particularly in our villages and small towns.
12:05 And people are looking after each other.
12:07 People are even sharing food and livelihoods.
12:12 It will happen, I believe.
12:15 And so I'm told by many government people
12:18 that there is enough food in the country.
12:20 In fact, there's so much food that is actually
12:22 rotting and being eaten by rats in our huge government
12:26 warehouses in which the private sector is now moving in.
12:30 And therefore, it's a matter of distribution
12:33 and a matter of affordability.
12:35 And in both cases, our government has taken action.
12:38 Rations are reaching to people.
12:40 My own workmen who've gone back to their villages,
12:43 they are getting this ration.
12:45 There is a little bit of problem with Aadhaar cards, et cetera,
12:48 but that is being sorted out.
12:50 In a country of 1.34 billion people,
12:54 I can assure you that if you've got the best
12:57 governments of the world together to come and sit
12:59 in India, they wouldn't do much more or much better
13:03 than what our governments have been doing.
13:06 Please consider, is the root of many of our problems
13:12 actually our population?
13:14 Is it a great strength and benefit for us?
13:19 Or is it something that we should
13:20 be looking at more carefully?
13:22 I know that it is taboo to touch this subject.
13:25 I'd like to be a little controversial.
13:27 And my views right through this interview are my own,
13:30 not that of any associations I'm connected with.
13:34 But can you imagine 30 million new people born every year?
13:41 Even if you look at the vaccination program,
13:44 it's 30 million or more people every year
13:48 across the age of 18 and need vaccinations again.
13:51 We are swimming up a waterfall at the moment.
13:54 And we have to first of all recognize
13:57 that the root of all problems is possibly the fact
14:00 that we are grappling with numbers that are too new.
14:05 If you look at the population chart of China and India,
14:12 China did things because they could
14:14 do so in their political system to reduce
14:17 the growth of population.
14:19 And you'll see it is like a sort of inverted path,
14:23 in some ways.
14:24 It was large before, and it's getting a little smaller.
14:27 And India is different.
14:30 It was smaller earlier, and it's getting bigger and bigger,
14:33 and possibly a little unstable.
14:37 Now, can you imagine if China, instead of having 1.8 billion
14:43 people, had 3 billion people?
14:48 Can you think that China would get ahead so far in the world
14:51 as they've got today?
14:53 If you look at nutrition, nutraceuticals, food
14:57 distribution, all from an angle that look over the next 10,
15:00 15, or 20 years, can we focus more
15:03 on keeping people satisfied with smaller families?
15:07 There are many ways of doing it.
15:09 Journalists and media are probably
15:11 the best way to support the government
15:15 can get to keep spreading the message continuously.
15:19 We had a few really famous actors
15:24 who we idolized and built into the theme of the film
15:29 the preference that that actor has for one child,
15:34 and how he explains to his wife how their standard of living
15:37 will drop.
15:38 If we can have actors explaining why they just
15:42 don't eat certain things because it's not good for their bodies,
15:45 and how they remain healthy by taking these foods
15:49 and not others, millions of people
15:52 follow what these actors are doing.
15:54 And that would be such a--
15:56 in India particularly, where so many people watch media, films,
16:00 and TV, it is actually so much easier
16:03 to get these messages across.
16:05 There is not skepticism of this area like there is in the West.
16:09 People will believe it if the right people say it.
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16:55 India has a great opportunity here.
16:57 And yes, intrinsically, they are safe.
17:00 There are always the outliers who
17:02 are trying to take advantage of probably lax rules
17:06 and regulations, bringing into supply the supply chain what
17:10 should not be there.
17:11 But look, this happens in food as well.
17:13 This happens in pharma.
17:14 This happens even in domestic appliances.
17:17 You have to root out these people who
17:19 are not straightforward and honest
17:21 in their ways of doing it, because we
17:23 have a regulatory apparatus.
17:24 And make sure that our real strengths
17:28 in this area of nutrition and herbal products
17:31 really comes to the fore.
17:34 India has possibly one of the largest biodiversity ecosystems
17:39 in the world.
17:41 Almost everything grows here.
17:43 Our mountains, Himalayas, are full of--
17:46 have been used by us for hundreds and thousands
17:48 of years for curative purposes.
17:51 Many Western medicines and patents
17:53 have been taken based on plants and nutrition.
17:57 So there is intrinsic value over here
17:59 that we need to focus more on.
18:02 Now, the nutraceutical industry is still nascent in India.
18:08 There is, around the world, something
18:10 like a $400 billion industry in nutraceuticals and dietary
18:15 supplements.
18:17 Two or three billion in India.
18:19 It's hardly 2% of the world.
18:22 It should be far more, and it will become far more,
18:26 because industrialists and entrepreneurs
18:29 are beginning to realize how important this product is.
18:34 In the time of COVID, the importance
18:38 has been accelerated.
18:40 And they realize that it's a great and equally noble
18:43 industry to get into as getting even farther.
18:47 Over 10,000 startups that have come in the recent past,
18:52 4,000 of them are to do with nutraceuticals, nutrition.
18:57 We're going to see a blossoming of this industry,
19:01 and rightly so.
19:03 There is this association called HADSA, the Hesdan Dietary
19:07 Supplements Association, which is the only recognized
19:10 body in India of the international association
19:14 with chapters around the world.
19:15 And they are doing a lot to help these young entrepreneurs come
19:19 into this industry, to give advice to the government
19:22 on setting proper standards, and trying
19:25 to do some self-disciplining to education of all its members.
19:29 So a lot is happening.
19:31 And it's a really exciting industry
19:33 and a really exciting future just in the next five or six
19:36 years.
19:37 I'm on the committee.
19:38 And I'm on the committee because I strongly believe in it.
19:43 I believe that it is as, if not more important
19:48 to avoid falling sick than to be cured when you fall sick.
19:54 Which is better?
19:55 Which is less expensive of the country,
19:57 to treat you when you fall sick or to make sure
20:00 you don't fall sick?
20:01 Secondly is, nutraceuticals keep you healthy right
20:05 through the year and right through your life.
20:08 One takes nutraceuticals every day.
20:12 One takes medicines only when one falls sick 10 or 15 times,
20:17 10 or 15 days a year.
20:19 So which one is more important?
20:21 Which one is more integral to your health and well-being?
20:25 It is nutraceuticals that give you immunity and give you
20:29 strength not to fall ill.
20:31 Well, already so many are stepping in.
20:41 And our advice from Akshay and from me
20:43 is always available to those who'd like it.
20:46 The process of setting up a startup
20:49 is very similar to any other.
20:51 Except today, nutraceuticals, health food ingredients
20:56 is the buzzword today.
20:58 And anybody starting up and wanting funding
21:01 will find it much easier to get the funding.
21:04 Information and the knowledge is available here.
21:07 1,000 new nutraceutical products
21:10 have been registered since COVID began, possibly even more.
21:14 So there's a lot of activity.
21:16 There's a lot of things that they can learn from.
21:19 And it will happen.
21:20 Remember some things which I'd like to mention.
21:31 And that is, again, our fear of this COVID crisis
21:38 and the havoc that it has created in our personal lives.
21:41 And you and I personally feel that we're
21:45 almost losing two years, the best years of our lives.
21:50 Of course, we have kept ourselves busy at home.
21:52 But we have not had the joy of meeting our friends
21:55 and family members and traveling and so on.
21:58 Now, this is controversial what I'm going to say.
22:02 And it's my personal view.
22:04 What we said is we have to first protect the very old.
22:10 I'm probably in that category, not very old,
22:12 but definitely old, because they are most vulnerable,
22:18 not realizing that actually that may or may not
22:20 have been validated.
22:22 Now, if you look at a person who's already 70 years old
22:26 and the person in any case would have lived to 75,
22:30 then you have not just lost one life,
22:33 but you have lost five life years.
22:37 Whereas if you protect a person who is 50 or 40
22:41 and is going to live to 70, you have protected 20 life years.
22:48 Consider not in terms of lives lost,
22:51 but in terms of life years lost.
22:54 I'm not saying we shouldn't have protected everyone.
22:58 But if you have to make some choices,
23:00 there are a limited number of protective devices available.
23:04 And consider also that the youth of this country,
23:07 the middle-aged people are those who work the hardest,
23:11 give the great value, create the GDP in our country,
23:15 pay the taxes, and create the community.
23:19 And people who have retired have retired.
23:22 They're not contributing anymore to the economy.
23:26 So what I'm saying is very controversial.
23:29 It's already too late to say it.
23:30 Because already, thank God, I'm glad that my friends and I
23:35 have been looked after on a priority basis.
23:37 But let's look very carefully at how we make choices.
23:41 My final request to the government and to everyone
23:45 else is that we spend far too little money on health care.
23:49 Now, I know I'm saying the obvious.
23:51 But look, spending 1.5% of your GDP to build hospitals
23:57 and to provide medicines to the masses of the community
24:01 is probably the lowest in the world.
24:04 And you cannot expect the private sector
24:06 to be making up that huge, huge difference.
24:10 The government has to step in.
24:12 The government has to provide more funding.
24:14 Again, I'm being controversial when I say,
24:19 buying one more fighter carrier is
24:25 equal to probably 100 hospitals.
24:30 That fighter carrier that dropped bombs
24:33 is looking around for an enemy which is outside our border.
24:38 Viruses are an enemy which is invisible
24:41 and is within our border.
24:43 Which enemy needs to be fought more fiercely
24:47 and with more funding?
24:49 There are 800 billion germs under your fingernails.
24:54 We eat food with our hands.
24:57 Washing hands, by the way, has been common in India
25:01 for over 1,000 years, if you look back in the old books.
25:05 We need today to accelerate the trend to keep ourselves clean
25:09 and follow the safety practices that you have already suggested
25:13 and everyone else knows.
25:20 Passion stops you from passing on.
25:26 You keep going because you have a passion for life.
25:29 Like many entrepreneurs, I have an intense curiosity.
25:34 I'm curious about everything and everyone.
25:37 And I read everything.
25:40 From childhood, I read everything I get my hands on.
25:43 And then that creates in you a great interest for life.
25:47 I would like to live to at least 110.
25:51 Behind me, you'll see 1,000 books.
25:54 Therefore, I deliberately put the camera that way.
25:57 I still have to read 80% of them.
26:00 I want to live to be able to read these fabulous books that
26:03 I've chosen and brought into India from all over the world.
26:06 So my passion keeps me going.
26:09 And that's what everyone requires.
26:11 And that's their secret to living a long and healthy life.
26:15 Food is your medicine.
26:17 Mood and your attitude is even better medicine.
26:21 This is what I practice.
26:23 (gentle music)