Udaipur’s Dr Manish Chhaparwal set out to fund his American dream. Instead, he set up India’s leading orthopaedic health care delivery system
Mewar Orthopaedic Hospital was created almost by chance. Its founder, Dr Manish Chhaparwal, an orthopaedic surgeon, had his sights set on higher education in the US. But while trying to fund further studies in America, Chhaparwal unwittingly laid the foundation for an exemplary business in health care delivery.
Today, Mewar has 12 branches across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. Apart from the main hospital in Udaipur, almost all the other units are located in rural and semi-urban areas. “I believe there is a big market in the rural areas if you can provide quality service at affordable prices,” says Chhaparwal.
The chief driver of Mewar’s success has been its focus on quality basic care without excessive capital investment. Its business credentials received a huge boost when several VC and PE firms evinced interest in investing. A series of negotiations later, Matrix Partners, which specialises in health care sector financing, invested Rs 35 crore in December 2012. Since then, it has opened eight new centres, adding to the four already existing.
The potential for expansion is massive. According to Chhaparwal, there are around 300 locations in India which have little to no orthopaedic health care facilities.
THE PEOPLE BEHIND IT
In 1998, Chhaparwal arrived in Udaipur, his ancestral town, after completing his masters in surgery (Orthopaedics) and DNB (Diplomate of National Board) in Mumbai. He was looking for a way to make money to fund his American dream.
As it turned out, he started making money very quickly because of the huge suppressed demand for orthopaedic treatment. “The ticket size was big, patient flow was regular and existing services at the ground level were zero,” he says.
By 2004, Chhaparwal and his wife, Devashree (also a doctor and a co-founder), had made enough money to fly Westward but they had begun to realise the huge opportunity that lay at their own doorstep. They invested Rs 60 lakh from their savings and also took some loans to build a 15-bed hospital. By 2006, they had paid back the debt and since then they have been “accumulating money”.
At some point, however, Chhaparwal says money had stopped being the main motivator. His new mission was to provide affordable health care to the under-served. Since 2004, he has been launching new centres almost on a yearly basis. “Each centre pays for itself in about two years,” he says.
(This story appears in the 06 September, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)