Narayana Hrudayalaya Dental Clinic (NHDC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Narayana Hrudayala Hospitals, is investing Rs150 crore to set up a chain of clinics across the country. The funds will be raised through debt and internal accruals.

The NHDC, which commenced operations in 2008, has seven clinics of which six are in Bangaluru and one in Kolkata. Initial expansion plan will be to open 300 clinics by 2013 across India and abroad. Abroad, the group is keen to start this facility in country like Malaysia where opportunities are similar to India.

"This will ensure dental facilities coming up across localities in the cities allowing easy and quick access to dentists. In India, 98 per cent of the segment is 'dentist-entrepreneur-driven'. Since dental health is of critical importance going by its impact on cardiac diseases and diabetes, there is a need to expand dedicated facilities in the country, considering this need. Our initial expansion plan is to roll out 30 clinics in Bangaluru and Kolkata in the next six months," said Dr Nitish Shetty, Managing Director, NHDC.

Currently, in Bangaluru alone there are 6,500 dentists and 3,000 clinics. There is a market for this specialty. Although the focus of expansion is metros, in the phase II, NHDC will look at tier II cities to help the patients have access to uniform quality care. Going by the scale of operations, NHDC is tipped to emerge as the largest player in dental care in the country.

According to market reports, global dental care industry is estimated to be around US$18bn and the dental equipment is pegged at US$15bn with a CAGR of five per cent and 4.5 per cent respectively. In India, the dental care services market is estimated to be US$600m with a CAGR of 10 per cent over 10 per cent since 2000 and its equipment sector valued around US$90m. The key growth driver in dental medicine is the growing awareness and interest towards need for healthy teeth and dental cosmetics. More than 80 per cent of the revenues generated for NHDC, since it commenced operations is from the aesthetic dentistry space, dental tourism forms 10 per cent of total Indian medical tourism, projected to grow at 30 per cent to Rs9500 crore by 2015. India produces more than 18,000 dentists annually from 283 dental colleges. The country has around 1,500 oral and maxillofacial surgeons.

The general dentist concentration is one dentist for every 30,000 persons. While urban concentration indicates one dentist for every 10,000 persons for the rural areas it is one dentist for every 2,50,000 persons. The oral disease prevalence in the country indicates that more than 80 per cent of children and 60 per cent of adults suffer from dental caries. More than 90 per cent of adults in the age-group of 30 years suffer from periodontal diseases.

Dental surgeons in India perform a number of Cranio Maxillo-Facial surgeries primarily because of the high incidence of congenital abnormalities affecting around 35,000 babies. Around 35 per cent of children suffer from misaligned teeth and jaws. Further, Decayed Missing Filled Teeth (DFMT1) score for teenagers is 2.4 and for 35-40 age-group is 5.4. In addition, over 17 per cent of the aged population is edentulous, the remaining 78.3 per cent have some teeth missing.