Be it the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry, the advancement in the automobile manufacturing industry, India is the most sought after. Health tourism is next, if promoted adequately. By Philip Knightly.

INDIA’S AMAZING progress appears to continue unchecked. Every list of nations that will lead the world by the middle of this century now includes India. The business pages of western newspapers and magazines are full of Indian success stories. Even the knockers have been silenced. A British journalist set out to show that the practice of moving the call centres of British companies to India had been a disaster. The story was to be that Indians staffing the call centres were ignorant of British attitudes and unhelpful. He found the exact opposite and was sufficiently honest to say so.

New examples of Indian business initiative appear almost daily. Take the electric car, a development that every major nation wants to encourage to remove our dependency on oil and help the environment. The solar car enthusiasts who race their cars over hundreds of kilometres in the United States and Australia have been at the forefront in inventing electric motors to power their vehicles. (They use solar power to charge the batteries which drive the motors).

SURGING AHEAD: The Indian electric car making forays in the international markets.

The Northern Territory University of Australia (NTU) developed an electric motor that does not need a mechanical gearbox and could therefore be mounted directly on the axle of a vehicle. Known as the axial flux motor, it was further improved at George Washington University in Virginia by a team led by Professor Nabih Bedewi and which included a Japanese solar car builder, Eric Takamura, and an Indian MBA, Anubhav Sethi. Their motors achieved an almost unbelievable efficiency rating of 95 per cent. You would imagine that every car maker in the world would be knocking at their door to mass produce their engine, but, almost unbelievably, their company, New Generation  Motors (NGM), had financial problems. Enter Rahul Bajaj of Bajaj Motors, India. He acquired the licence to manufacture and market the NGM motors in India and immediately invested $5 million in a factory near Pune. He plans to launch an electric auto rickshaw, the Eco-Ric, later this year.

According to the website goodnewsindia.com, the Eco-Ric will sell for Rs1.5 lakhs, does 130 kms on a single charge, can be recharged overnight and apart from being pollution free, is almost silent. Electric motors in scooters and bikes will follow in due time and, eventually, Bajaj plans electric cars as well. The Wall Street Journal points out that Indian motor scooters are making inroads in export markets from Manila to Miami and that Tata is exporting Indian-designed and made automobiles all over the world while well-known car makers such as Daimler-Chrysler and Toyota now import crankshafts, steering wheels and other automobile parts from India.

Then there is a new growth industry of a very different kind - health tourism. First class medical care in many western countries is either too expensive, or in countries like Britain that have a national health service, involves lengthy waiting lists for major operations. India has stepped into the gap in this market and hopes to attract one million health tourists a year worth up to $5 billion. A heart by-pass operation in the USA can cost $30,000 compared with $6,000 in India. A bone marrow transplant costs $250,000 in America and $26,000 in India. Elderly people who have waited months for a hip replacement in Britain can get it done immediately in India at little more than the cost of a holiday there. Clinical outcomes in India measure up to the best in the world, the doctors are mostly internationally qualified, and the general care in the hospitals more attentive than in the West.

Last year about 150,000 patients travelled to India for treatment ranging from complicated brain surgery to the replacement of amalgam teeth fillings with porcelain. The next logical step will surely be care homes for the elderly. British old-age pensioners can have their pensions paid anywhere in the world. If they could be certain of a pleasant environment and a high standard of care, then I am sure many could be persuaded to move to India and use their pensions there. When I have suggested this to elderly friends in Britain they often reply that they would not see their children and grandchildren so often. To this I reply that in modern Britain with the collapse of old-fashioned family life, they do not see them very often here anyway. And wouldn’t the relatives be more likely to visit grandpa and grandma if it involved a holiday in an exotic foreign country?

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