Healthcare tourism in India: Opportunity and challenges

Healthcare tourism is an act where people from all around the world are traveling to other countries to obtain medical, dental, and surgical care while at the same time touring, vacationing, and fully experiencing the attractions of the countries that they are visiting. Actually people travel to avail of such facility because of much cheaper rates or those treatments such as Ayurveda or Yoga therapies which are not available in one's own country. Health tourism is a fast growing multibillion-dollar industry around the world and it entails trade in services of two major industries i.e. medicine and tourism. It has enormous prospective for generating employment and earning huge sum of foreign exchange. India has lot of opportunity to develop healthcare tourism and to capture a big share of industry. But on the other hand there are lots of challenges which Indian tourism industry has to face before developing health tourism in India. The present paper outlines an overview of healthcare tourism in India and discusses opportunity and challenges of promoting it in India with some valuable suggestions to develop India as a global health tourism destination.