Aster’s Alisha Moopen on why global investors are flocking to India’s healthcare

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mergers in the healthcare sector aren’t just about business, they help deliver quality medical treatment to smaller towns, insists Alisha Moopen.

“Doctors in Bengaluru, who might not go and live in Kolhapur (about 600 km away), are willing to go once a week or once a month to Kolhapur and do the sort of surgeries that a hospital in Kolhapur will not be able to get," Moopen, deputy managing director at Aster DM Healthcare, told Mint in an interview. “So you actually end up being able to share resources, that knowledge-sharing, of getting your doctors who are sitting in the metros, sitting in the cities, which at this point of time might be the ones doing the more cutting-edge work, and with this network into the tier two, tier three cities, get them to go there so that they do not have to come to the urban cities," Moopen said.

The other benefit of any merger is the scale of a larger network, she said. “If the scale increases, my purchasing power, negotiation, is much higher and that brings benefits which can hopefully be passed on." Moopen’s comments come amid reports of Bengaluru-based Aster merging with Hyderabad-based Care Hospitals.

According to a Mint report on 5 August, the combined entity would become India's third-largest hospital chain. To questions on the potential merger, Moopen did not offer any comments.

Aster, in a stock exchange filing in September, stated that while the company routinely explored strategic opportunities no material events had taken place requiring disclosure under the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s listing obligations and disclosure requirements. Moopen, however, said Aster was going ahead with its plans to add almost 2,000 beds over the next