Narrative is changing about senior care industry: Tara Singh Vachani

Executive chairperson of Antara Senior Care says 'service delivery' has to be the cornerstone of senior care industry

TARA SINGH VACHANI is the executive chairperson at Antara Senior Care, which she says it is building India’s largest integrated senior care “ecosystem” in India. She spoke to Namrata Kohli about how the Indian senior care industry has evolved over the years.

How and why did you start with senior care?

I want to be able to say that it was like a thunderbolt from the sky but it wasn’t. I moved back to India and was wondering what to do next. At that time, the group was doing multiple new things and entering new businesses. My father was handling a very executive hands-on role and told me “why don’t you come and be a fly on the wall”. At that time, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Even while growing up we never had conversations about ‘this is what I would like to do’ or parents dictating ‘we would like you to do this’. They just wanted to nurture us in the here and now. So when I joined the organisation as a fly- on-the-wall intern, I realised that I hated being one because I wanted to be involved and engaged in something responsible. I travelled abroad to do an audit of a company we were thinking of acquiring and that company started to talk about senior living and senior care. That just resonated with me. I am not a business thinker and I am a political science and English literature major.

I had a chat with my father that there is something fascinating about the idea. He, being an entrepreneur, was always willing to try new things. He seemed to have the courage to take the risk. He literally nudged me to bring this thing from just being an idea to some sort of a construct. For two years I just studied the concept in India and the world. Then we just went ahead with it.

Which verticals come within the ambit of senior care at Antara?

We started with one vertical, Antara Residences, which is what people called senior living because these are communities where seniors live. But now the industry and our company are called Senior Care because we do many more things than just residences. We have essentially four different verticals. We also have Antara care homes, or assisted living for seniors who need full time care and assistance with daily activities such as food, medicine management, physiotherapy over short term, mid-term and long term. Our third vertical is care-at-homes where we provide everything from ICU care to physiotherapy etc. Last and not the least is AGEasy by Antara where we are targeting chronic conditions. One of our subjects is knee pain and you will be surprised to know how many people even in their fifties suffer from knee pain and we solve the problem with a whole bracket of products such as braces, walking aids, physiotherapy, nutrition aids.

Today we are the most organised player in India and have managed to at least change the nomenclature and language from senior living to senior care industry. Worldwide this industry actually is called senior care and it encompasses various different products and services. We at Antara have always wanted to be an integrated platform, with multiple products and services at different locations, avatars and offerings.

Out of the four verticals, which has the most demand in India?

The demand is there for everything related to seniors. Out of the many ideas pitched to me in senior care industry, I have not come across a single idea for which there is no demand. The question is just the timing of it and the price point around it.

I break up demand into what “I want” and what “I need”. Antara Residences has now become “I want”. When we had launched Antara Residences, the level of conviction needed was much more. People would say that they are fine in their homes as they have cleaners, cooks coming and because of social stigma attached to senior living, they were reluctant. Care-home model is where "I need" it and the model is directly linked to the moment of truth when there comes a health episode or a medical crisis and when that occurs, the necessity kicks in. In a country like ours there is demand for everything. And in this senior care space which is a fragile vulnerable ecosystem that has such little products and services to offer there is demand through and through.

We have so many stories of uncles and aunts who gave needed products and services to age better. I remember my mum when she was taking care of my grandparents, who lived in Dehradun and used to come and spend time with us for a few weeks. It would be a project to find the right walker or a wheelchair or a commode chair. We had the luxury and the privilege to travel abroad so we used to buy from a very fancy shop in London and then we had to lug it back to India. Today Antara makes all those things- walkers, walking sticks, wheelchairs, our own beds. That’s how much things have transitioned and changed because there is demand in every category and vertical.

Where is senior care in India versus the global market?

America is a front runner in the senior care industry. They have every type of product and service at every price point. But we are where America was probably 60 years ago. But we also have a population that is way larger. We have a long way to go and have a lot of supply to create. We have to create that supply with far more quality than it is being created today. The fact that I have been here for 10 years now, and I would get less offended when people call it an ‘old age home’ and more offended when people call us real estate, only because real estate also has a reputation of people building assets, juicing out the financial returns and then leaving.

Today real estate has redefined itself and people have a lot of respect for good quality players, like what Max Estates is doing. The fact is that we have to understand that this is a service-led thinking and offering. Being in senior living under the category of senior care the frontrunner has to be the concept of service delivery and how am I genuinely contributing to the quality of life of the person I am serving. How am I enhancing their experience of life and aging? Quality has to be redefined with that lens. We lack supply of all products and services, quality assurance and quality thinking that needs to be there and finally we don’t have the level of government advocacy and policy that we need to be able to grow the way we really want to. Today what is very positive is that the narrative is changing. You can have a conversation about senior care and senior living without people saying “oh old age home – that I won’t send my parents, that I won’t go there as my children will take care of me”. It’s taken 10 years just personally for me to see that change but I think that’s a big positive shift.

What are your thoughts on opening senior homes for rentals?

When we started Antara Residences, at that time we found there was no market for rentals. Land cost, infrastructure cost simply did not make it feasible for rental. In India, people are used to such low rents that it doesn’t actually commercially work out for an organisation like ours to do a rental model. The corporate buying that land, building that kind of infrastructure and the cost of our capital being 17-18 per cent – it doesn’t make sense for us to do a rental model. Also people want to own that asset. But we have started seeing that a small shift is happening where there are people who want to rent and want to come for long term rent. But whether they are willing to eventually pay what we need to charge them I don’t think they are ready yet.

Of the verticals that you have, where are you focused on?

I have to say it will be equally all three: Antara Residences, care homes and AGEasy. I have a very deep excitement for all three: Residences, because I know that space and what it takes to do that. I am sure there will be different challenges in every location but inherently I understand the consumer and that market very well. The Care home space really excites me because there are no options. In the residences space, if you didn’t have that you could still continue to live in your own home and curate your own quality of life. There are no alternatives to Care Homes. What happens when someone has had a stroke or heart issue or dementia with nobody to take care of them. Their children move back, bag and baggage, and are miserable here.

The Care Homes is very emotionally led and is a very practical asset lite model because we don’t go and build that asset from scratch. AGEasy is a completely new age business. For me, that’s where the learning is happening the most. It’s a completely tech driven business – our acquisition of business, our sales happen through technology and yet we are still able to have a deep-rooted connection with our customer. So, Residences I know and I can feel it and it feels more intuitive. Care homes there is a deep need and AGEasy is just huge amounts of learning while Care at Home is a completion of service