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Indian healthcare sector is increasingly recognising Allied and Healthcare Education as a strategic academic category. As demand for skilled healthcare professionals continues to outpace supply, stakeholders across academia, industry, and healthcare delivery call for greater investment in allied health education, curriculum innovation, and industry-aligned training.
Nalin Saluja, co-founder & CTO, Virohan has noted that the global healthcare industry has a workforce problem. WHO estimates a global shortage of nearly 18 million health workers by 2030. India alone has a paucity of over 6 million Allied & Healthcare Professionals (AHPs), while our healthcare workforce density remains around 21 professionals per 10,000 people, less than half the WHO benchmark of 44.5.
When we talk about healthcare, the conversation usually centres around doctors and nurses. But the system relies just as heavily on Allied & Healthcare Professionals, who make up nearly 60% of the healthcare workforce. Lab technicians, radiographers, physiotherapists, OT technicians, optometrists and many others support diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, and patient care every day. The challenge is no longer recognising this shortage. It is building the workforce to close it, he added.
The NCAHP Act, 2021 has brought standardised curricula, competency-based education and a common framework to Allied & Healthcare education for the first time. The Union Budget 2026-27 has further reinforced this direction with a Rs 1,000 crore allocation towards strengthening the healthcare workforce. While the framework exists, the challenge is execution which begins with education, said Saluja.
India's Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education continues to improve, but enrolment alone does not create employability. According to the India Skills Report 2025, only around 55% of graduates are considered employable. Healthcare faces a similar challenge. This year alone, over 22 lakh students registered for NEET-UG, while only a small fraction will secure a medical seat. For nearly 94.3% students, the conversation ends there, even though healthcare offers dozens of other meaningful career pathways, he noted.
Here, Allied & Healthcare education has an important role to play. The focus is to create awareness about this career path and on preparing students for the realities of the workplace from the day they graduate. This has been one of our biggest learnings at Virohan as a healthcare-focused edtech and vocational training company over the past decade. We see that healthcare cannot be taught entirely inside a classroom. Students learn best when education reflects the environments they will eventually work in which is competency-based learning, industry-designed curriculum, technology-enabled practical training, and continuous engagement with employers. When students train on the same workflows, equipment and clinical protocols they will encounter in hospitals and healthcare organizations, the transition into the workforce becomes seamless. Hence employability has to be designed into education and cannot be added at the end, Saluja told Pharmabiz.
The opportunity before us is not just to train more healthcare professionals. It is to build a workforce that is competent, employable, and ready to strengthen India's healthcare system from day one, said Saluja.
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