Priya Prakash

Updated March 2019

27 year-old Priya Prakash had very personal reasons for founding her business, HealthSetGo, a company offering comprehensive health services to India’s schools. As a teen Priya was bullied at school for being overweight. At college she starved herself and suffered from binge eating. “I was in a physically and mentally abusive relationship with myself and I wasn’t aware of it,” says Priya, “I went from being a promising student to a D-grader.”

A life-changing moment

It was in a gym that she met the person who would change her vision: a weightlifting coach who believed in her. “Thanks to him I fell in love with fitness and weightlifting. It turned my life around. I took all the mental and physical strength I built in the gym to heal myself.” In 2017 Priya won the silver medal at the Delhi State weightlifting championship. But only after she had created HealthSetGo.

The young CEO knew from the outset that she wanted to start her health programme with children. “There was no official health curriculum and no organised benchmark for schools to follow,” she says. To start, she approached one school. “The principal helped me understand that before offering solutions for healthcare, fitness and nutrition, you have to make people aware of the problem.” After testing her model there for over a year, Priya hired an intern then an employee and was ready to go.

Access to Healthcare

Today HealthSetGo (HSG) has a team of 25 and is present in over 200 schools in 77 cities across India, where it rolls out a full set of healthcare services. These range from annual medical assessments with doctors, storing and tracking student health records online, installing HealthSetGo infirmaries and deploying medical practitioners and insurance. HealthSetGo’s online platform acts as a store for a child’s health data, providing smart analytics and insights to enhance communication between schools and parents. It also develops added-value applications, such as curated family health journeys.

Health Education and Fitness

Other services include the CAREBOX, a monthly pack covering themes around food and nutrition, hygiene and sanitation, physical and mental health. “It’s a fun, engaging and readymade solution for schools to kickstart health education in the classroom,” notes Priya. The company’s newest offering, HealthSetGo Play, is particularly close to Priya’s heart – a training kit offering instructional videos, manuals and 32 weeks of workouts. From spring this year, 30,000 students in 1,000 pre-schools will enjoy a weekly HSG Play class. “Sports tend to focus on a specific skill, whereas fitness opens the door for the entire school to participate,” Priya notes.

While previously serving mostly private schools, HealthSetGo has recently signed a government contract for children living below the poverty line. “Our first round of monitoring showed that only eight out of 594 students were free of health complications. We are now looking forward to continuing the programme with 10,000 more pupils,” notes Priya, whose ambition is to stimulate a healthy lifestyle and reduce the economic burden sickness brings to her country.

Tough figures

The figures speak for themselves: obesity is on the rise, notably in children, 14.4 million of whom are obese in India, a New England Journal of Medicine study finds. Diabetes too is a major issue, with 72 million cases in 2017, as logged by the International Diabetes Foundation, set to almost double by 2025. To top it all, the WHO reports that India is the most depressed country in the world. Rather than let such figures get her down, Priya Prakash is doing something about it.