Indian Healthcare’s Sustainability Report Card

January 3rd, 2022

Healthcare and Sustainability are two sides of the same coin — On one side we have climate change and pollution severely accelerating illness among citizens whilst poor resource management in healthcare contributes to 14% of India’s total energy consumption and generates 39 million tones of CO2 per year. Now, let’s look at this through a different lens — do you see opportunity? Opportunity to innovate, optimize and reimagine the way out health care system works; opportunity to make room for better engineering, new age technology and higher standards for sustainability.

This decade brought with it cyclonic surge in demand for quality healthcare at affordable prices. The Covid — 19 pandemic highlighted our short comings in terms of health care accessibility, lack of rural penetration, the plights of the urban poor, the sheer lack of proper energy and waste management systems and most of all , the disparity in development. The nation banded up together to scramble for resources; the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, GOI erected 150,000 Health and Wellness Centers since then to provide primary health care. But this is only the first step — driven by demand, by 2027 India expects to see a 30% rise in total hospital stock. This also comes with a 15–20% increase in energy intensity from 153 kWh/m2/year to 179 kWh/m2/year, a whopping 45% growth in energy consumption of hospitals.

Let’s zoom into this — Bureau of Energy Efficiency, India sounded the alarm saying that the average energy consumption by HVAC in hospitals in anywhere between 30–65% of the total energy consumption. According to a survey in the Summer Study of Energy Efficient Buildings 2022, currently only 56% of the hospitals in India have operational air conditioning and none of the smaller public healthcare facilities, including Primary Health Centre, Health and Wellness Centre, and Community Health Centers carried this facility, irrespective of the climate zone. Of the total hospitals that had air conditioning, it was found that 67% of the hospitals were belonging to the private sector — the undemocratized half of healthcare. The study also highlighted the need to revamp or conduct targeted retrofit programs to improve the energy efficiency of these systems as a large number of them were non-star rated systems, HFC-based refrigerant systems and/or were rated less than 3 stars according to the BEE label. Given the degree of efficiency the future demands, the timing is ripe for administrators and stakeholders to ensure that the years to come don’t turn grim.

As we rebuild our healthcare system and expand its reach, it’s important to honor India’s ambitious COP26 pledges, reflect of past errors and move with equality — towards a more robust, accessible, and sustainably build healthcare system. An urgency — utilize this nations intellectual, human, and material capital to develop an infrastructure capable of catering to India’s large and diverse population.