Powering the next wave of business for the hygiene sector
Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are leading the charge as India invests in the healthcare sector, both from the government and private sector. The target is become resilient by 2047. Parallelly, the cleaning technology for hospitals is also showing tremendous growth. Strict protocols meaning hospitals will need to invest in keeping the premises spick and span. How this is an opportunity for the cleaning and hygiene segment, explores Manka Behl, Principal Correspondent, Clean India Journal.
Every new hospital bed adds a fresh demand for cleaning technology and the industry is entering its strongest growth cycle yet.
As India steps into the final quarter of the year, the healthcare boom projected for 2025 is no longer a forecast — it is visibly taking shape. While the exact figures of the number of healthcare centres that came up this year is not readily available, there is a good spread of the new facilities that have come up across the country.
Much of this activity is concentrated in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, where infrastructure growth is the strongest indicator of a changing national health landscape. And as new hospitals take shape, the silent but essential machinery that keeps them clean, infection-free and audit-ready is parallelly entering a new phase of demand. India’s cleaning-technology sector is standing at a pivotal moment, driven not merely by compliance needs but by the sheer pace at which new healthcare facilities are being built.
India is building healthcare for 2047 and the hygiene industry will grow on the back of every new facility that opens.
Big Budget
The Union Budget 2025–26 underlined this shift with clarity. The government strengthened its healthcare commitment with a 9.8% increase in budget allocation, raising the total outlay to ₹99,858.56 crore, significantly up from ₹90,958.63 crore in the previous fiscal.
This notable rise reflects the Centre’s focus on expanding medical infrastructure, bolstering primary and secondary healthcare, and ensuring that healthcare becomes more accessible and affordable across both urban and rural India.
The enhanced allocation also underlines a wider national ambition: Building a resilient, future-ready health system aligned with the government’s Viksit Bharat 2047 vision.
Significant Progress
The government has outlined the need for roughly 20 lakh additional hospital beds to reach the benchmark of two beds per 1,000 people — a milestone that requires both public and private investment on an unprecedented scale.
While consolidated national figures on how many new beds have been added in the past year are not yet available, the directional indicators are clear. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s annual report noted that 3,284 hospitals were newly empanelled under PM-JAY in 2024 alone, nearly half from the private sector. Facility accreditation too is rising with over 10,500 public health centres received National Quality Assurance Standards (NQAS) certification in 2024, signalling quality improvements even as new infrastructure is being built.
As healthcare expands in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, the cleaning industry stands to gain more than ever before.
Redrawing The Map
India’s Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are witnessing a major expansion in healthcare infrastructure. According to data gathered from different sources, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are emerging as the fastest-growing states in terms of upcoming hospitals in 2025. Each state has six new facilities under development, driven largely by government investments in medical colleges and district-level tertiary care.
Maharashtra follows with five projects, while Assam has four significant additions, reflecting a notable push toward strengthening healthcare access in the North-East as well. States such as Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka have three new hospitals each, signalling balanced but steady growth across regions.
In Guwahati, the Pragjyotishpur Medical College & Hospital opened its doors in early 2025, marking one of the Northeast’s most significant recent additions. In Muzaffarpur, Bihar, a new Homi Bhabha Cancer Hospital and Research Centre began operations in August, strengthening oncology care in a region long underserved. Odisha’s Koraput district saw the inauguration of the Shaheed Laxman Nayak Medical College & Hospital — a 650-bed teaching hospital that now anchors specialised care in southern Odisha’s tribal belt.
Hospital hygiene is no longer a support function; it is now a core investment area driving business for the cleaning sector.
Private Expansion
Even as public facilities expand, the private sector continues to be India’s most transparent and aggressive builder of healthcare capacity. According to Investment Information Credit Rating Agency (ICRA), India’s hospital industry is set for major growth, with at least 13 players expected to invest up to `32,000 crore by FY-27 which adds up to around 14,500 beds. “Structural factors such as rising lifestyle diseases, higher awareness and affordability, and preventive health check-ups will continue to fuel demand,” the agency stated. The planned bed additions represent a 26% increase over current capacity and are aimed at addressing unmet demand in underserved regions such as Nagpur, Lucknow, Ongole (Andhra Pradesh) and Coimbatore.
A recent Business Standard report outlines an aggressive expansion phase for the country’s private healthcare sector between FY-25 and FY-29, with nearly 34,000 new private hospital beds expected to be added through a cumulative investment of about ₹40,000 crore.
The growth will be geographically broad, with North India accounting for 46% of the upcoming capacity, followed by South India at 30%, West India at 13%, and East and Central India together contributing 11%. Significantly, the report notes that 38-40% of these new beds — around 14,000 in total — will be located in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
Major hospital chains have laid out extensive multi-year expansion plans to support this surge. Apollo Hospitals is set to add approximately 3,512 new beds through a two-phase expansion project representing a 34.5% increase in its current capacity and backed by an investment of around ₹6,100 crore. Max Healthcare has announced an even sharper scale-up, targeting the addition of about 3,700 beds by FY28, which would amount to a 76% growth over its existing capacity and involve capital expenditure of roughly ₹5,000 crore.
Doubling Rapidly
With tens of thousands of new hospital beds being added and much larger pipeline planned until 2047, India’s cleaning-technology sector is entering a decisive growth phase. The momentum is not just from new buildings, but from the systemic shift in expectations around hospital hygiene and audit-ready cleaning protocols.
India’s infection-control technology market is already worth $1.2 billion in 2024, and it is projected to nearly double to $2.1 billion by 2033, reflecting surging demand from rapidly expanding hospital infrastructure.
Similarly, the hospital sterilisation-equipment segment is set to grow from $370 million (2024) to $707 million (2030) at an 11.4% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) — one of the fastest in the medical equipment ecosystem.
The larger disinfection and sterilisation equipment category, including washer-disinfectors, slow-temperature sterilizers and vaporized hydrogen peroxide technologies is projected to grow at 8.4% CAGR, climbing from $7.6 billion (2025) to $12.4 billion (2031).
Robotic Cleaning
Automated cleaning isn’t just niche anymore. One of the fastest-growing categories in fact is robotic disinfection systems which is gaining real traction in Indian hospitals. The Indian disinfection-robotics market is projected to reach $531.8 million by 2030, growing at a striking 22.2% CAGR.
These robots use UV-C light or hydrogen-peroxide vapour to disinfect rooms autonomously — minimizing human risk, ensuring consistent cycles, and helping hospitals comply with stringent infection-control norms.
Stricter Cleaning Protocols
In March 2024, the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare released an updated version of the National Guidelines for Infection Prevention and Control in Healthcare Facilities, introducing clearer and more stringent expectations for environmental cleaning in Indian hospitals. The amended protocol places strong emphasis on risk-based zoning requiring facilities to classify all areas into critical, semi-critical and low-risk zones and follow differentiated cleaning frequencies and approved disinfection methods accordingly.
The update also strengthens the requirement for validated terminal-cleaning cycles in ICUs, OTs, isolation wards and other high-risk areas, with hospitals expected to document completion of each cycle as part of routine IPC audits.
The updated sixth edition of the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) standards, effective from January this year, require hospitals to maintain digital, auditable housekeeping and cleaning logs, including traceable sterilisation-cycle records.
According to the Hospital Manual published by the ministry in April this year, newly built or expanded hospitals must incorporate occupancy sensors, automated UV-C or hydrogen-peroxide vapour (HPV) systems for terminal cleaning, and ATP-based surface contamination testing to satisfy accreditation audits.
Apart from this, the National Health Mission (NHM) Implementation Guidebook for the Kayakalp programme states that large-district hospitals opened or expanded after 2023 must include infrastructure for autonomous scrubber-driers, colour-coded micro-fibre systems, smart dispenser analytics and centralised cleaning-equipment stores. This represents a shift from traditional manual mop-and-bucket regimes to tech-enabled, traceable systems across the hospital footprint.
This report has been compiled from various reliable sources.