India’s preventive healthcare market contributing $98 billion: Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath

Preventive healthcare also has a massive opportunity to make money with the projected size of the market to hit $197 billion, which is around Rs 8 lakh crore by 2025

New Delhi: India’s preventive healthcare market has doubled in size in the past four years, with ‘wellness and fitness’ alone contributing $98 billion and occupying a major 51 per cent of the total market size, according to Nikhil Kamath, Co-founder at Zerodha. Preventive healthcare also has a massive opportunity to make money with the projected size of the market to hit $197 billion, which is around Rs 8 lakh crore by 2025.

”Everything health-related in the last decade felt like it was too early. This seems to be changing now, with health and longevity becoming mainstream in urban India,” Kamath posted on X social media platform.

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Everything health-related in the last decade felt like it was too early.
This seems to be changing now, with health and longevity becoming mainstream in urban India. The timing might be right now for entrepreneurs to build something in health. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/aDBDKO4ujm

— Nikhil Kamath (@nikhilkamathcio) February 27, 2025

According to the data shared in the post, live fitness content consumption has increased as much as 1,300 per cent since Covid pandemic times, which, completely transformed the world’s view on health.

It is this growing consciousness that India is going to benefit from. The post further substantiated the potential growth of the fitness industry by comparing the under penetration of wearables and gym goers in India with the world. As per 2021 data, according to Kamath’s post, 114 units of fitness wearables are sold per 10,000 people in India as compared to the global average of 645.

This makes the fitness wearable sales 82 per cent less in India against the global number. Indians on average spend anywhere between Rs 4,000 to Rs 10,000 annually on preventive healthcare. Preventive healthcare includes exercise, healthy nutrition, health insurance, early diagnosis and heath tracking, according to his post.

Another insight from the post revealed that India lags far behind in gym subscriptions, with 0.2 per cent of the world’s total tally.

”Moreover, not only do we have the least gym subscriptions in the world but over 50 per cent gym members aren’t regular. The data also highlighted that India currently has 96,278 gyms in total,” according to the data.