India’s medical tourism sector has slipped below its pre-pandemic peak, with international patient arrivals down for a third straight year, the Economic Times reported. Provisional government data describes a sustained decline rather than a single poor year, and it lands as competitors across Asia press their own advantage. For a country that had treated medical tourism as a dependable growth line, the figures mark a genuine reversal.
The arrival numbers behind India’s decline
Provisional figures from the Bureau of Immigration show that about 450,633 medical tourists arrived in India between January and November 2025, the Economic Times reported. That count is on course to fall well short of the 644,387 arrivals recorded a year earlier. The high-water mark came in pre-pandemic 2019, when 697,453 foreigners travelled to India for medical care, so current arrivals sit far below the level the sector once treated as normal. The wider picture is no kinder, the Economic Times reported, with foreign visitor numbers across Indian tourism also down, which points to a problem broader than the medical segment alone.
Bangladesh, geopolitics and a single source market
Much of the fall traces to one relationship. Bangladesh has long been India’s largest source market for international patients, and industry executives told the Economic Times that the rupture in diplomatic ties has cut sharply into that inflow. The political shift after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime in 2024 is widely read as the trigger for a rapid drop in inbound arrivals. Bureau of Immigration data show 466,012 tourists came from Bangladesh for all purposes, medical included, by November 2025, against more than 1.75 million Bangladeshis in calendar year 2024, a large share of whom had travelled for treatment.
Girdhar Gyani, director-general of the Association of Healthcare Providers of India, told the Economic Times that the decline in Bangladeshi patients had been rapid over the past two years, while recent improvements in ties could begin to reverse it. This is the concentration risk that shadows every destination built on a single source market, a geopolitical shock transmitted straight into a healthcare business. When one country supplies the largest cohort of your patients, its politics become your commercial exposure, and a change of government abroad can empty wards and idle operating theatres at home. India built a substantial share of its medical tourism on Bangladeshi inflows, and it is now paying the price of that dependence.
Competition from Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia
The pressure is not only diplomatic. Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia are competing hard for the same international patients, the Economic Times reported, each with developed health-tourism accreditation, subspecialty depth and efficient treatment pathways. Their pitch increasingly targets the mid-to-high end of the market that India once won on price arbitrage alone.
Gyani argued that price can no longer be the whole proposition. India, he said, must “change the tag of a cheap healthcare provider” and compete instead on high technology and fast, reliable delivery. That is the correct diagnosis. Competing on cheapness is a race that a lower-cost neighbour eventually wins, and it caps the value of every procedure a destination sells. The move from cheapest to best is the harder road, yet it is the only one that holds margin when a rival undercuts you.
Where India’s operators see recovery
Industry leaders are not writing the year off. Suneeta Reddy, managing director of Apollo Hospitals, told the Economic Times that the current hit would prove temporary, and she pointed to new growth corridors in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. She also expects sustained demand for complex work, in oncology, cardiac sciences, transplants and neurosciences, the high-value procedures where India’s clinical depth is strongest. The five drivers of medical travel, better, best, cheaper, faster, or unavailable at home, still favour India in oncology, transplantation and neurosurgery, the tertiary specialities where its expertise runs deepest.
Abhay Soi, chairman and managing director of Max Healthcare Institute, told the Economic Times that shifts in West Asia could open room for India, reconfiguring medical travel routes and the movement of clinicians in ways that favour Indian hospitals. Soi said India could become a more attractive destination over the medium term. Both readings point the same way, towards the complex, high-margin procedures and diversified source markets that reduce exposure to any single corridor.
What the numbers ask of India
The strategic lesson runs through the whole account. A destination that leans on one source market and one price argument is fragile on both counts, and India has just felt the first while being warned about the second. The sensible response is the one its own operators are describing, spread the patient base across Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Commonwealth of Independent States and, if West Asia reshapes as Soi expects, the Gulf, and move the brand from cheap towards a premium footing built on high technology, subspecialty accreditation and dependable outcomes, judged on morbidity rather than price.
Visa processing sits underneath all of it, the Economic Times reported, since delays at the point of entry undo the marketing that draws a patient in the first place. Diplomatic repair with Bangladesh, faster medical visas, and a repositioning away from the cheap-provider tag are the three levers within India’s own control. The arrival cohort for the next full year, not the forecasts, will show whether the country has pulled them. India retains the clinical capacity to lead in complex care, and the open question is whether it fixes the machinery that delivers patients to it.
