New Delhi- India will need nearly 2.9 million additional hospital beds by 2035 to bring its healthcare infrastructure closer to global benchmarks, creating demand for an estimated 2.6 billion square feet of additional healthcare real estate, according to a report by CBRE South Asia released on Friday.
India currently has around 1.6 hospital beds per 1,000 people, compared with the global average of 3.3 beds, highlighting the scale of the infrastructure gap. The country’s healthcare real estate footprint, estimated at 2.1 billion square feet in 2025, will need substantial expansion to meet growing requirements.
The report said the shortfall presents significant opportunities for developers, investors and healthcare operators to build purpose-designed facilities that can expand with demand.
Investment in the sector is increasingly moving towards specialised healthcare facilities, day-care formats and acquisitions as operators seek to expand their presence and improve access to medical services.
Southern states, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, have relatively stronger healthcare infrastructure compared with their non-communicable disease (NCD) burden. In contrast, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand have lower hospital-bed availability relative to their NCD burden.
Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana also benefit from stronger household incomes and established healthcare infrastructure, supporting further investment in specialised medical facilities and healthcare ecosystems.
“Healthcare is emerging as one of India’s most consequential real estate opportunities, not simply because demand for care is increasing, but because the country needs a far deeper and more distributed physical healthcare network,” said Anshuman Magazine, Chairman and CEO for India, South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa at CBRE.
He said built-to-suit (BTS) developments could help bridge the infrastructure gap by providing healthcare operators with purpose-built clinical facilities tailored to their operational and regulatory requirements.
Such arrangements could allow healthcare providers to channel more capital into clinical services, medical equipment and technology, while giving property owners greater income visibility through long-term leases, he added.
The report also highlighted growing demand for facilities beyond conventional hospitals, including diagnostic centres, day-care surgery units, preventive health screening centres, rehabilitation clinics, eye-care centres, in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) centres and vaccination facilities, particularly in urban areas.
In highly competitive markets, healthcare operators are increasingly considering acquisitions of existing hospitals to establish a presence more quickly by leveraging their operational infrastructure, licences and patient networks.
–IANS