India has placed third in the latest India healthcare ranking of public perceptions of care quality, behind only Malaysia and Singapore. The Ipsos Health Service Report 2026, released on October 16, puts the country alongside some of the world’s most admired health systems. Nearly seven in ten Indians, 68 per cent, rate the quality of healthcare available to them positively, while 64 per cent say they trust the system to give them the best treatment when they need it.
The global India healthcare ranking comes from Ipsos, the Paris-based market research firm, and measures how citizens across countries judge their own health services. Malaysia tops the 2026 index, followed by Singapore in second and India in third. Vietnam, Australia and the Netherlands take the fourth, fifth and sixth spots, with Thailand, South Korea, Spain and South Africa completing the top ten. The index captures perception, not clinical outcomes: how easy people find it to see a doctor, how much they trust the system and whether they think care is getting better.
The 2026 edition continues a series Ipsos has published for several years, tracking how ordinary people judge the services they use. Past editions have repeatedly found the same gap between rich and poor countries: wealthy nations spend more on care but their citizens often report less satisfaction, weighed down by waiting times and bureaucracy. India’s high placement suggests that, in the public’s eyes, a system can feel good to use even when resources are stretched.
What the India healthcare ranking measures
On access, the India healthcare ranking data shows Indians are among the most positive in the world. About 73 per cent said making an appointment with a doctor was not difficult for them, and 81 per cent said getting to a pharmacy was easy. More than half, 54 per cent, said they expected the quality of healthcare in their locality to improve in the coming years, against a global average of 31 per cent. In many advanced economies, by contrast, the public conversation is dominated by long waiting lists, overstretched services and staff shortages.
The Ipsos report frames India as an outlier at a moment when confidence in health systems is under strain in much of the world. That is what the India healthcare ranking finds, and it covers the whole system as people experience it, from neighbourhood clinics to large private hospitals. Citizens here are more likely than people elsewhere to say care is accessible, improving and worthy of their trust. Doctors’ groups in India have long argued that the country’s private hospital chains set high standards for certain procedures, from cardiac surgery to transplants, and that medical tourists keep arriving for exactly that reason. The Ipsos numbers measure something different, the view from the waiting room rather than the operating theatre, but they point in the same direction.
What could improve the India healthcare ranking
The same report names the weak spot that could hold the India healthcare ranking back: affordability. About 74 per cent of Indians said many people in the country could not afford healthcare, and 42 per cent named high costs as the biggest problem in the system. Indians are therefore among the most positive about their healthcare and among the most worried about paying for it, a tension that runs through the whole report.
The affordability question is the one the numbers keep returning to. Quality ratings and trust scores sit high, but the bill at the end of treatment worries households. The report stops short of prescribing policy, but the India healthcare ranking data draws a clear line: the next gains for Indian healthcare are more likely to come from costs than from clinics.
Malaysia, which leads the index, and Singapore, which sits second, both score on the same blend of trust and access. India is the only large, lower-middle-income country in the top three, which makes its India healthcare ranking position notable. The countries at the bottom of similar global measures in past years have included Poland and Hungary, where public confidence in care has been far weaker.
The 2026 figures give the country’s health story a number to defend, and the India healthcare ranking now sits in the public record. Ipsos released the findings on October 16, as part of its annual Health Service report.