How Can India Redesign Its Healthcare Beyond 2025?

Heart problems are more prevalent than ever. Sedentary lifestyles, poor eating habits, and chronic stress have become everyday norms, particularly in urban areas. Cardiac care should not start in the ICU—it must begin in clinics, gyms, schools, and homes. Unless we integrate mental health services, promote work-life balance, and embed stress management into the foundations of cardiac well-being, we are merely firefighting.

Diabetes is often viewed as an urban problem, yet it is quietly making inroads into rural India, often undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or ignored. Even rural health workers are not immune to the rising threat. Data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows a significant increase in diabetes prevalence. A meta-analysis of 1.7 million adults found that diabetes in rural India rose from 2.4% in 1972 to 15.0% between 2015–2019. More recent numbers from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that 14.3% of the rural population is affected.