Narrative is changing about senior care industry: Tara Singh Vachani

TARA SINGH VACHANI is the executive chairperson at Antara Senior Care, which she says it is building India’s largest integrated senior care “ecosystem” in India. She spoke to Namrata Kohli about how the Indian senior care industry has evolved over the years.

I want to be able to say that it was like a thunderbolt from the sky but it wasn’t. I moved back to India and was wondering what to do next. At that time, the group was doing multiple new things and entering new businesses. My father was handling a very executive hands-on role and told me “why don’t you come and be a fly on the wall”. At that time, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Even while growing up we never had conversations about ‘this is what I would like to do’ or parents dictating ‘we would like you to do this’. They just wanted to nurture us in the here and now. So when I joined the organisation as a fly- on-the-wall intern, I realised that I hated being one because I wanted to be involved and engaged in something responsible. I travelled abroad to do an audit of a company we were thinking of acquiring and that company started to talk about senior living and senior care. That just resonated with me. I am not a business thinker and I am a political science and English literature major.