Times Now Health Summit 2026: Dr Sivaranjani Santosh Reveals What It Really Costs To Be A Doctor In India

The Times Now Health Summit is currently ongoing in Hyderabad, with Dr. Sivaranjani Santosh delivering one of the most powerful speeches. The city's celebrated paediatrician known across the country as India's "ORS Lady" is famous for her relentless eight-year campaign against misleadingly labelled rehydration drinks. Her address set a fitting tone for a summit built around real, on-the-ground battles for better healthcare. Today, she used the platform to candidly speak about the everyday sacrifices doctors make and the strain that India's evolving healthcare landscape places on the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Santosh began by reflecting on the scale and diversity of the challenge Indian doctors face - treating patients across vastly different

socio-economic backgrounds, in both India's busiest cities and its most remote villages. She spoke about the personal cost behind this work, recalling "so many sacrifices, so many missed birthdays, so many missed anniversaries," and pointed out that even "when our people are sick at home we are still treating another sick person." Despite this, she said, the moment a doctor revives a patient or sees relief return to a worried family makes it "a privilege to be able to take care of" so many people.

The Role Of AI And Public Perception

Dr. Santosh also addressed the growing role of technology in medicine, asserting that AI "can only complement us, it cannot replace the human touch" or a doctor's clinical judgement and empathy.A significant part of her address focused on how the public perception of doctors has shifted. While doctors were once seen as "the pillars of strength for many families," she said rising healthcare costs have increasingly cast them as "someone who is always ready to please the patients." With this, she also pushed back against this framing, insisting that most doctors work "true to our conscience and definitely not with an ulterior motive."Dr. Santosh was particularly critical of doctors being brought under the ambit of the Consumer Protection Act, arguing that it has reduced the doctor-patient relationship to "seller and buyer kind of thing." She said this defensive posture has made some doctors "hesitating to take risky decisions" that could otherwise save lives.To rebuild trust, she called for "transparent billing," greater empathy, and stronger ethics training for young doctors, stressing that "arrogance has no place in our profession." She also underlined the need to strengthen public health infrastructure to ensure equitable care for all, and closed by urging the media to acknowledge the long hours and "very low pay that the vast majority of medical professionals endure."For the unversed, the Hyderabad-based pediatrician spent 8 years campaigning against the false marketing of sugary drinks that were leading consumers to mistake them for Oral Rehydration Solution - popularly called 'ORS'. On October 14, 2025, her very persistent advocacy culminated in the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) directing food business operators to remove the term 'ORS' from products unless they met prescribed medical standards. This victory in no way came overnight - it was built over years of persistence, with many moments which likely didn't turn out the way Dr. Santosh had imagined them to.