a person · IndiaPrathap C. Reddy

The cardiologist who founded Apollo Hospitals, the first corporate hospital chain in India, and who is named on the group's own leadership page as Founder and Chairman. Apollo opened in Chennai in 1983 with 150 beds. The chain that grew from it is the single largest supplier of hospital care to foreign patients in South Asia, and the reason this directory has an India section at all.

The training came first and the business followed from it. Apollo's own account has him taking his medical degree at Stanley Medical College in Chennai, training as a cardiologist in the United Kingdom and the United States, and holding a fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston before returning to India.

What he built was not a hospital but a category. Before 1983 Indian private medicine was the nursing home and the consulting room; a corporate hospital raising capital, buying imported equipment and charging fees was new, and contested. The export trade in surgery came later and followed the same structure — an international patient office, a quoted package, a visa letter.

Honours date the recognition: the Government of India conferred the Padma Bhushan in 1991 and the Padma Vibhushan, its second highest civilian award, in March 2010.

Inference — a founder's record is the place where a hospital group's own claims about itself should be read most carefully. Apollo's leadership page states that the group has grown to "over 10,000 beds across 76+ hospitals, 7,000+ pharmacies, 2,500+ clinics and diagnostic centers" and that it has been "honoured by the trust of over 200 million individuals who came from 150 countries". Those are the group's own figures, undated on the page, and no register was read against them for this record.

English Wikipedia gives his date of birth as 5 February 1933, citing an Apollo press release that no longer resolves. No first-party page read for this record states a birth year, and none is asserted here.