YourStory.in

A Quartet usually bears great symbolism whether it be the fields of arts, music, religion or fact. There were the four Beatles, the Fantastic Four, the Four Noble Truths, and now there is the foursome from Swasth. Yourstory interviewed Arvind Saraf, Ankur Pegu, Sundeep Kapila, and Devashish Saini, four young Indian Entrepreneurs with an idea and the zest to see their dreams come to fruition. They explained their idea and what it means for the rest of India - "The vision of Swasth India is to build a healthy and resilient India by ensuring health security and equity to all."

They have set themselves a mission for the coming 5 years – “to ensure access to affordable and quality health services to 15 million low-income persons by 2015.” They plan to achieve this by building a social business to improve the health of low income households in India – both rural and urban slums through implementing effective disease prevention, health promotion activities and ensuring access to affordable and quality healthcare services. “We approach to solve this problem by working with community-based organizations to design self-sustaining, comprehensive and customised health systems and support implementation by providing a range of technical services like provider management, quality monitoring, claims processing, drug supply chain, information management and project management.”

In order to design and implement such a comprehensive health system, Swasth India plays the role of a service integrator and works with different service providers across the health value chain of doctors, labs, pharmacies, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, insurance companies and brings them on a common platform to deliver quality services to low income households through the community-based organization.

Their idea is different from prevalent and existent market norms. The essential differences were pointed out by them. "there are three key differentiators to our model”, point out the four young social entrepreneurs.

“Firstly, to build a comprehensive health system rather than looking at parts of the value chain like most other solutions, e.g. micro-insurance products, low cost hospital chains, low cost drugs companies. This enables us to build low cost and low overhead system through integration across various aspects of healthcare – preventive, primary, secondary and tertiary".

“Secondly, to build a rigorous quality-monitoring and assessment system that includes consumer feedback. The Indian health systems, including government run providers, do not have any quality-monitoring mechanisms. As a result of this, consumers do not have a mechanism to either express their opinion, share their experience or the ability to make informed decisions about the choice of provider”.
“Thirdly, working with community based organisations is an important differentiator and will help us enter and scale up faster. Community based organisations like NGOs, MFIs, co­operative banks, etc. have build immense social capital and trust with the community through years of hard work. We understand that and appreciate the challenges in replicating the same. Hence, our model is centered around working with these organizations in order to reduce the initial resistance to a new entrant while also allowing the community based organizations to capitalize on their social capital."

The four of them were driven to pursue entrepreneurship after traveling along different paths but were bought together by the same motive in their minds, as they revealed.

For Arvind the desire to do something more impacting was what drove him along the entrepreneurial path - "I used to be in a regular job. However, I wanted to do something potentially more impactful, more challenging and with a greater opportunity for learning. Entrepreneurship gave me that opportunity” – as he puts it.

Ankur was driven to this idea in the pursuit of seeking greater roles beyond what his “regular job of 7 years” gave him. “The urge to become an entrepreneur came towards the last year of my job. This was spurned by the desire to take on larger roles which would have a much larger impact on the society. I had evaluated a few opportunities and when Sundeep threw up this idea, I grabbed it”, says Ankur.