Apollo Sugar, the one stop clinic for diabetes management, will invest ₹15-20 crore in the next year to expand its network to 100 clinics across the country by March 2018.

At present, the company, part of the Apollo Healthcare Group and with partnership of French Multinational Sanofi, has 52 specialised clinics, mostly in South India and West.

“We will have a 80:20 ratio in company-owned and partnership with doctors model to realise the expansion,” Gagan Bhalla, CEO, Apollo Sugar, told BusinessLine .

The healthcare brand subsidiary of Apollo Health & Lifestyle has ambitious plans to reach 300 clinics in the next three years. Most of the growth will be in Central and Eastern India.

At present, there is one clinic in Kolkata. The scope is to set up 50-75 in the next three-four years. Similar is the opportunity in Central and North East, he added.

Since its launch in 2013-14, Apollo Sugar has been growing at 60 per cent year-on-year and the customer base has reached 225,000 now. Given the magnitude of problem, the demand, need and commitment to tackle this preventable, lifestyle disease is enormous, the CEO said.

In collaboration with Sanofi, which also has invested, the company is doing research into diabetic retinopathy, early stage use of statins, insulin calibration according to patient need and so on.

Giving an idea of the problem, Bhalla said Apollo has screened five lakh people in the last two-and-half years, of whom a lakh are from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Of these one lakh, 25 per cent were either diabetic or pre-diabetic, against the national average of 16-17 per cent.

Therefore, its important that a public-private partnership (PPP) be forged to handle this rapidly escalating problem, he felt.

Referring to the upcoming Budget, Bhalla hoped there will be a significant increase in allocation to healthcare and specially to preventive care aspects.

The government should support the PPP model, he said.

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