How GCC can benefit from India’s budget, focus on healthcare

The most headline-grabbing item on India’s annual budget concerned – perhaps unsurprisingly – healthcare.

Delivering her budget statement to parliament on Monday, Indian Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman proposed an increase in spending to 2.2 trillion rupees ($30.2 billion). This represented a staggering twofold increase in healthcare spending and was timely to say the least.

At just 1 percent of gross domestic product, India is currently one of the lowest spenders on healthcare out of all the major economies. Moreover, it bears the second-highest coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caseload in the world.

In other words, this is an important and encouraging step in not just India’s, but the global fight against COVID-19.

Now, if India leveraged its longstanding partnerships with its neighbors and allies in the Middle East and South Asia (MESA) region, it could take a leading role in carving out a path to global health and economic recovery. And it could start with the GCC, whose members have had to adapt and overcome with more agility and innovation than most.

Indeed, when the COVID-19 pandemic started to come into full force in March, GCC nations were quick to act. In a rapid and coordinated response that won praise from the World Health Organization, GCC members implemented varying degrees of lockdown. Halting the spread of one the most contagious virus outbreaks in modern times was priority No. 1, but it was not long before a host of new challenges emerged.

Principal among them was the issue of supplying essential items and services such as pharmaceuticals and healthcare across a region where imports account for more than 80 percent of pharmaceutical supplies. Moreover, with the GCC as primarily a consumer rather than producer of pharmaceuticals and healthcare, the region was lacking an effective research and development sector. Nor was the situation made any easier by the state of intraregional trade within the GCC – at just 10 percent of total trade, well below other regions.

And all this before the disruptive impact of COVID-19 had even come into play. However, in overcoming these challenges, the GCC has changed its approach to healthcare and pharma forever.

The development of increasingly sophisticated technology and startup ecosystems has been a key pillar of regionwide economic diversification efforts.

Tala Fakhro

Moving from a consumer to a producer of research and innovation is a GCC ambition by no means limited to pharmaceuticals and healthcare. However, given their urgency and relevance to the pandemic, these segments in particular became key areas of focus.

While proper pharmaceutical and healthcare research and development is sparse across the region, there were some existing examples. In July, Bahrain saw the launch of Bahrain Pharma, a $30 million specialty healthcare manufacturer bringing the country to the forefront of the pharmaceutical industry.

However, the urgent needs of the pandemic served as a catalyst for enhanced research and development throughout the entire region. The region’s contributions to international research through the likes of first plasma therapy and later, vaccine trials, played a vital role in getting the global healthcare community to where it is today regarding a vaccine and options for treating COVID-19.

Also catalyzed by COVID-19 has been the digitalization of GCC healthcare. Health technology has seen a surge in the region and last year ended with Saudi Arabia hosting the HIMSS & Health 2.0 Middle East Digital Health Conference and Exhibition. The digital three-day event – organized in joint collaboration between the Saudi Ministry of Health, the Saudi Health Council, and the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties – shone a particular light on the role of technology in healthcare, no doubt inspired by the events leading up to it.

2020 saw public and private sectors coming together to produce technology that could track COVID-19 cases, communicate with doctors and pharmacists, and more.

In Bahrain, multilingual robots have been utilized in isolation wards to check body temperatures, administer medicines, serve meals, and sterilize treatment rooms with beams of ultraviolet light. In the UAE, police even deployed smart helmets capable of scanning temperatures of hundreds of people every minute.

As for the private sector, Bahraini cloud software service for clinics, Weyak, serves as a great example of the kind of innovative startup which evolved in line with the needs of the pandemic. It allows doctors to prescribe medication to patients and then have it delivered by the time the patient reaches home, and it has been enormously successful.

The development of increasingly sophisticated technology and startup ecosystems has been a key pillar of regionwide economic diversification efforts. It was this groundwork that allowed GCC entrepreneurship to pivot so seamlessly to where it was needed, which in turn has laid the foundations for a thriving regional health technology market in the years to come.

There is much that India can learn from the nimble and resilient GCC nations. But there is just as much that the GCC can learn from India, which was already earning a reputation as the “pharmacy of the world” even before Monday’s ambitious budget statement.

Speaking in a webinar late last year, the Indian Ambassador to Bahrain Piyush Srivastava highlighted the significant opportunities for strengthening India’s partnerships with the Gulf across the healthcare and pharmaceutical space. This statement rings even more true today than when it was first made last year, as some of Bahrain’s supplies of the all-important COVID-19 vaccine come from India.

COVID-19 has been, and continues to be, a global tragedy. But as the world seeks to rebuild economies in 2021 there are plenty of lessons that can be learned from the pandemic experience. They are not just about how people should live their lives, but also about how to do business, and what is most important for nations.

The region has the skills and capability to contribute to the global health agenda in a significant way – COVID-19 has taught it that. Enhanced collaboration between MESA neighbors is a clear next step in the global fight. India’s new budget is a call to arms.