Access to medicines remains uneven across rural and semi-urban India

Access to medicines remains uneven across rural and semi-urban India. What are the key structural bottlenecks that still persist in pharma distribution today?

The pharma distribution challenge in rural India is not just a logistics problem. It goes much deeper, which is also why it has remained difficult to solve.

Private healthcare has largely been concentrated in urban centres, which means that in many rural markets, pharmacies have become the most accessible point of care. While this has helped improve access, these outlets are often not run by trained pharmacists. In many cases, they are managed by local traders, where medicines may be dispensed without prescriptions and treatment adherence remains inconsistent. Over time, this contributes to larger public health concerns such as antibiotic resistance.

Another aspect that does not get enough attention is the issue of quality assurance. In fragmented supply chains, especially in remote markets, ensuring the authenticity of medicines becomes a challenge, increasing the risk of substandard or non-verified drugs entering the system.

So the issue is not one single gap. It is a combination of supply chain inefficiencies, limited clinical oversight at the last mile, and the need for stronger quality assurance.

How can technology-enabled distribution models realistically address challenges like stock-outs, last-mile delivery, and demand forecasting in under-served regions?

Technology enables scale, but it cannot replace physical infrastructure. That distinction is important, because there is often a tendency to assume that a strong platform alone can solve last-mile distribution in rural India. In reality, it needs to work alongside a well-built on-ground network.

What technology does enable is more intelligent fulfilment. It helps coordinate the entire supply chain—from order placement and procurement to real-time distributor decisions. At CureBay, our clinic network generates real prescription data, giving us visibility into disease patterns, what is being prescribed, and where the gaps are. This is real field intelligence, not modelled assumptions.

To address stock-outs, we have built a distributed warehousing model with central hubs and supply nodes closer to our clinic clusters. This allows us to fulfil demand even when a partner pharmacy does not have a specific medicine, ensuring that patients can access authentic medicines within a predictable timeframe.

In your view, how critical is the role of integrated care models—linking consultations, diagnostics, and pharmacy in improving long-term patient outcomes?

Integrated care models are not just important, they are fundamental to improving long-term patient outcomes. What we have seen over time is that most single-point interventions in rural healthcare tend to fall short. Telemedicine alone, diagnostics in isolation, or standalone pharmacy models address specific needs, but they do not solve for the full patient journey.

At CureBay, the focus has been on continuity of care. A patient walks into a clinic, vitals are captured by a trained nurse using connected devices, a doctor consults digitally, and an e-prescription is generated. Diagnostics and medicines are fulfilled within the same ecosystem, and if a hospital referral is needed, it is coordinated end to end, with follow-up care continuing at the clinic.

That connected loop is what makes the model effective. Screening feeds into consultation, consultation into prescription, and prescription into fulfilment. Each step builds on the previous one. When any one of these links is missing, the care journey becomes fragmented, and outcomes are impacted.

With increasing focus on generics and cost optimisation, how can healthcare providers balance affordability with quality and trust among patients?

There is often an assumption that rural patients will prioritise price over quality. In our experience, it has been quite the opposite. What we have seen on the ground is that trust plays a far more important role in healthcare decisions than price alone.

Early on, we believed that lowering consultation prices would drive adoption. But the feedback from communities was very clear. The concern was not about cost, but about credibility. Patients wanted to know who the doctor was, how reliable the diagnosis would be, and whether the care being provided could be trusted. Even today, what patients ask about most is the quality of service, the credibility of referral hospitals, and the reliability of diagnostic and pharmacy partners.

The same applies to generics. The hesitation is not about generics as a concept, but about confidence in the supply chain. In environments where quality can be inconsistent, patients often have no clear way to differentiate between verified and non-verified medicines. So the starting point has to be building trust through consistent quality, verified supply chains, and reliable care delivery. Once that foundation is in place, affordability becomes a much more natural outcome.

What were the key strategic considerations behind acquiring Saveo’s pharma distribution business, and how does it accelerate CureBay’s growth roadmap?

This acquisition is more than just a supply chain addition. At CureBay, we see it as bringing together capabilities that would have taken years to build organically.

There are four key elements to this. First is talent. Members of Saveo’s founding and leadership team, including co-founder Amit, have joined us, bringing deep domain expertise in pharma distribution. Second is their technology platform, which enables end-to-end visibility from order tracking to real-time procurement decisions. Third is their established relationships across procurement and distribution, which are built over time and are difficult to replicate quickly. And fourth is their operating processes, which are designed to balance service quality, procurement efficiency, and speed of fulfilment.

At CureBay, we had already built a strong demand layer through our clinic network, with over 200 clinics generating real prescription demand on the ground. Medicine lies at the core of the healthcare journey, and this acquisition significantly enhances our ability to meet that demand with greater reliability and efficiency. By integrating both demand and supply within a unified ecosystem, we aim to deliver a more seamless, consistent, and comprehensive experience for patients.

How will this integration translate into measurable improvements for patients and partner pharmacies?

At CureBay, we are not looking at this acquisition purely from a scale perspective. For us, it has to deliver on clearly defined outcomes, and we measure success against them.

The first is serviceability, ensuring medicines reach even the remotest areas we operate in within a predictable timeframe. The second is authenticity, making sure patients receive genuine medicines against valid prescriptions through a verified supply chain. The third is affordability, where we are not only enabling access to high-quality generics but also introducing transparent pricing and standard substitutes so patients can make informed, cost-effective choices.

For patients, this creates a meaningful shift. It is the difference between fragmented access and a more structured care journey that brings together consultation, prescription, and reliable medicine fulfilment closer to home. This level of continuity is often taken for granted in urban settings but remains a gap in rural markets.

For pharmacy partners, this builds a more dependable and transparent ecosystem. We are able to drive prescription-led demand through our clinic network while supporting them with a consistent, verified supply chain and clearer pricing benchmarks. While this may appear as a supply chain integration on the surface, for us it is fundamentally about strengthening the patient journey, with the supply chain acting as a critical enabler.