Four People Shaking Up the Status Quo in Emerging Markets

What problems do you hope to solve during your six-year term?
My slogan for the city is innovation and rights. I want to expand access to rights—not only education, health, but also culture and sports. I also want to improve the environment in the poorest parts of the city. The city is very unequal, and if you want to reduce violence, you have to reduce inequalities.

Can you give some specific examples of how you do that?
On the east side of the city you have 1 square meter of green area per person, and on the west there are 10 square meters per person. We have built around 10 new parks in the city. We’ve planted about 10 million plants and trees. We’ve rescued two rivers that were contaminated with sewage.

Your administration has set a goal of reducing air pollution by 30%. How do you intend to do that?
We want to be the city with the biggest electromobility program, but we are building that with trolleys, not electric buses. We’re going to have 500 trolleys in the city.

How are you going to pay for all of this?
Benito Juárez once said “you cannot have a rich government and a poor people.” Where do you get the money? You get it by shrinking government. And the other thing is stopping corruption.

Has the pandemic set back some of your plans?
Covid hit Mexico City very, very hard. We are a city of 10 million that is part of a metropolitan area of 22 million people. Most of the important projects are going to be developed. We thought some would be completed by the end of 2020, and now it probably won’t be till 2021. My team knows that we can sacrifice other things, but not what we offer to the people.

How do you balance your background as a scientist with your dedication to politics?
I think politics has to be part of everybody’s life. There are many issues where I agree with not only [Mexican President] López Obrador but also with what Morena [the ruling party] stands for. We agree that you cannot sell your oil, your resources, because you lose part of your sovereignty. We believe Mexico has a great future if we end corruption. And we believe that education, health, and housing are basic rights. —Interviewed by Nacha Cattan

You are trained as a doctor. What prompted you to become an entrepreneur?
One catalyst was that I lost my father to an unnecessary surgery in a very expensive, big hospital. Then you realize that the problem of health care being broken is not just for the poor and the underserved. It’s everywhere.

What part of this broken system are you trying to fix?
In India, 28% of the population did not have access to a doctor. In the rural areas, in the remote areas, clearly there is the challenge that doctors are not available, that facilities may not be available, and people may have less money. So doctors migrate and start practicing in larger hospitals in bigger cities. We said let’s see if we can create a better model—something that can meet clinical outcomes as well as being affordable.

What’s the solution your startup came up with?
What we have done is taken the examining room, the test lab, and the pharmacy and put them together into a single whole. This brings down the cost in terms of money and time. Our latest innovation, called HelloLyf, is 64 square feet and can be installed anywhere.

Can you explain how the concept works in practice?
There is no physical doctor, only a nurse who runs you through the whole system. I, the doctor, may be sitting in Bangalore and the patient is in Odisha, but today’s technology allows you to use rich video to carry out an examination. Our clinics are equipped with a digital stethoscope, a laryngoscope, a fetal Doppler. The quantity of medical data is huge, it’s vast. So we built a clinical decision-support system that basically ensures doctors are able to do better diagnoses. Drug interactions, dosages, contraindications are sorted out, and doctors can focus on the patient rather than trying to think through the data. Finally, the pharmacy is automated to dispense medications. For the equivalent of about $4, you get a doctor, your tests, and your medications.

And what kind of reception have your 240 clinics gotten?
In India and other poor countries, health care is only sought for the wage earner. The old, the women, and the children, they are neglected. Almost 50% of our patients are women, which means we have increased the equity in society. —Interviewed by Pradipta Mukherjee