Ask how big India’s medical tourism market will be in 2026 and nearly every answer lands on the same figure: 13 billion US dollars. It sits on FICCI’s sector page, it anchors ministerial speeches, and it headlines most press coverage of the industry. The figure deserves closer inspection than it usually gets, because it is not a measurement. It is a projection, roughly four years old, and the Indian government’s own arrivals data spent 2025 moving in the opposite direction.
Where the 13 billion dollar figure comes from
The most quotable source is the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. FICCI’s medical value travel page states that the Indian market, estimated at around 6 billion dollars in 2022, is projected to grow to 13 billion dollars by 2026, on a compound growth rate of 21.1 percent between 2020 and 2027. The Ministry of Tourism’s National Strategy and Roadmap for Medical and Wellness Tourism, published in 2022, carried the same trajectory. Union Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat repeated it this February at the 6th FICCI Medical Value Travel Awards, held during Advantage Healthcare India in Greater Noida, telling delegates the sector would cross 13 billion dollars this year. A Grant Thornton report covered by The Tribune in March 2025 put the number slightly higher, at 13.42 billion dollars, and the wire services carried it without much interrogation.
What none of these citations contain is a method. The projection dates from the post-pandemic recovery years, when arrivals were rebounding fast off a collapsed base, and it has been restated ever since without adjustment. More telling is what the Ministry of Tourism said in a written Lok Sabha reply on 9 February 2026: that it has not conducted any study of the sector’s current status, key challenges or growth potential, and that it does not maintain state-wise data on arrivals or on the revenue medical tourism earns. The ministry promoting the 13 billion dollar target told Parliament, in the same month its minister restated that target, that it holds no revenue data to check it against. That is the first honest thing to say about India’s medical tourism market size: nobody in government is measuring it.
What the arrivals data shows
The one official series that exists is the Bureau of Immigration’s count of foreign tourist arrivals for medical purposes, published through the Press Information Bureau. It runs: 697,453 in 2019, 182,945 in 2020, 323,748 in 2021, 474,798 in 2022, 659,356 in 2023 and 644,387 in 2024. The provisional figure for January to November 2025 is 450,633, about 5.7 percent of all foreign arrivals in the period. Even with a strong December, 2025 will close somewhere near half a million, more than a fifth below 2024 and getting on for 30 percent below the 2019 peak. India’s medical arrivals never fully recovered their pre-pandemic level; they came close in 2023 and have fallen since.
Set those counts against the revenue claims and the arithmetic turns uncomfortable. Take FICCI’s own pairing: 6 billion dollars earned from 474,798 arrivals in 2022 implies about 12,600 dollars per arriving patient. Reaching 13 billion dollars in 2026 on anything like current volumes would require roughly 26,000 dollars per arrival, a doubling of per-patient billing in four years. For scale, Apollo Hospitals’ results material puts its average revenue per inpatient, across all payers, near 171,000 rupees, about 2,000 dollars. International patients buy costlier procedures and longer stays, and the immigration count misses people who travel on ordinary tourist visas, so the real market is larger than crude multiplication suggests. But a market that doubles in dollar terms while its patient count falls by a fifth is a market someone should be able to document. Nobody has.
Bangladesh is the fault line
The arrivals table hides a concentration problem. In 2024, 482,336 of India’s 644,387 medical arrivals came from Bangladesh, three out of every four. The next largest source, Iraq, sent 32,008. When the Hasina government fell in August 2024 and India tightened visa issuance in Dhaka, the sector’s largest corridor narrowed, and the 2025 decline followed almost mechanically.
Apollo Hospitals, the country’s largest listed hospital chain, shows what that looks like on an income statement. Its fourth-quarter FY25 investor material quantified the drag from fewer Bangladeshi patients at 1.2 percent of inpatient volumes, with international patient services the smallest of its four payer categories, a mid-single-digit share of inpatient revenue. Financial press coverage through the year described the group rebuilding that book with patients from Africa, West Asia and South East Asia.
Two readings of Apollo’s numbers are available, and I think both are correct. The reassuring one: even for India’s most internationally visible hospital group, foreign patients are a single-digit slice of revenue, so the Bangladesh shock dents growth rather than solvency. The awkward one: if international work is a mid-single-digit business at the listed flagship of Indian private medicine, a sector-wide claim of 13 billion dollars implies a great deal of revenue that no listed operator can show on its books.
Heal in India and the supply-side wager
The government’s response runs through the Heal in India umbrella. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is building capacity for it through public-private partnerships, and the e-medical visa and e-medical attendant visa now extend to nationals of 171 countries. The Services Export Promotion Council runs an accredited-provider portal that the tourism ministry links from its own sites. The biggest commitment came in the Union Budget for 2026-27, presented on 1 February, when Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a scheme to support states in establishing five Regional Medical Hubs with the private sector, integrated complexes combining treatment, teaching and research with AYUSH centres and medical value travel facilitation desks.
Everything on that list adds supply. Almost nothing on it addresses why demand fell. India’s 2025 problem was not a shortage of beds or accredited hospitals; it was a visa regime that closed the biggest patient corridor for political reasons, and a source-market mix so lopsided that one border decision erased a fifth of national volume. Five new medical hubs will not fill themselves while that remains true. If I were allocating the budget line, I would spend it on the dull plumbing instead: visa processing in second-tier source markets, bilateral patient-referral agreements, and a published revenue series so the sector can be steered by data rather than by slogan.
What This Means
The 13 billion dollar figure is a target, not a tally. It originated as a projection around 2022, survives on repetition by FICCI, ministers and consultants, and is checked by no official revenue series, because none exists. The measurable record points the other way: arrivals peaked in 2019, slipped in 2024 and fell hard in 2025 after the Bangladesh corridor narrowed. My own reading is that the true 2026 market lands well short of 13 billion dollars, and the burden of proof sits with anyone claiming otherwise. Rather than the headline number, watch whether Dhaka-Delhi visa traffic normalises and whether the Ministry of Tourism starts publishing revenue data. The day it does, India’s medical tourism market will finally have a size instead of a slogan.
