Health Care, Courier and Other Emerging Services

Alongside BPO/KPO, e-business, franchising, leasing and tourism, a number of other service activities have expanded rapidly in India and are worth noting as part of the same broad trend toward a more diverse, technology-enabled service economy.

Health-care services have grown well beyond the traditional hospital-and-clinic model: telemedicine allows patients, particularly in areas with limited local specialist access, to consult doctors remotely using video and data links; diagnostic chains and health-insurance-linked hospital networks have expanded the reach of organised, corporatised health care into smaller towns; and, as noted in the previous section, India has become a significant medical-tourism destination.

Courier and logistics services — organised, time-bound door-to-door delivery of documents and parcels by private operators — have grown alongside the boom in e-commerce, which depends entirely on reliable last-mile delivery to the customer's doorstep; this is a distinct, faster and more specialised service from traditional postal or railway parcel services. …