Effect Of Diabetes In India

Most of today's population suffer from blood sugar or diabetes. Diabetes has now become a common household name. But what is the solution to curb this 'silent killer' disease. The need for a solution is dire. This is the time, we need organisations that can provide innovative solutions. Quick-fixes might not be possible, but bit by bit solutions will be created, refined and implemented. Change will come, but it will come slowly. And the model for this change would have to be a very Indian model, replicable maybe across the world, but very ‘India-specific’ in terms of implementation and design. One may counter this argument by saying that there’s nothing ‘Indian’ about managing a disease – and people may want to know what we mean by an ‘Indian’ solution – is it better or worse? When we say 'Indian Solution' it means the solution would be reachable to the majority of population – the masses. Solutions may be crude, they may have 60-70 percent reliability, but they will need to benefit the nation overall. Any business which wants to create solution for managing diabetes will do extremely well, if they can manage to serve the scale. Ultra-low cost solutions on a humungous scale will dominate – however, how does anyone start? The problem is classic – if you have scale, you can lower the cost; but till you get scale, you may be compelled to keep prices high – and as a result it will be tough to scale.

The Scale of the problem

• Diabetes is amongst the largest and fastest growing diseases in India (40-50 M people; $30 Bn cost burden)

• 70 percent of the cost is because of complications due to lack of proper management of the disease

Why should diabetes be a key concern?

• Diabetes restricts the lifespan both in urban and rural population. There is considerable loss in potentially productive years (35 - 64) of life. Hence there is need for devising appropriate strategies for their proper control and management.

• The cost structure of diabetes to society is enormous and run into thousands of crores of rupees, if we take into account the direct costs to people with illness, their families, indirect costs to society, due to reduced productivity; and intangible costs, such as compromised quality of life. In other words, the overall increase in GDP and life expectancy through reduction in mortality due to diabetes can be quite substantial.

• It is estimated that overall prevalence of diabetes is 62.47 per 1,000 people in India.

• Some of the major reasons for high morbidity and mortality on account of this disease are low awareness of risk factors, the near absence of technical competence at different levels of health facilities and high treatment costs.