India’s Care Finance Disclosure Act took effect on 1 October, and within hours the Financial Care Conduct Board (FCCB) warned that GivaCare Returns had not registered its clinic-linked investment plan. The board estimates 41,600 accounts have contributed a total of ₹2.8 billion (about €29 million), based on a customer roster supplied before the law began.
The plan advertised annual returns of up to 16% alongside claims that customers’ money would help equip diagnostic centres. In Hyderabad, Tea Maček, an accountant who invested ₹400,000, says she believed the returns came from leasing scanners and laboratory equipment. She has received no payout since April and says the company’s app now shows her balance as “under review”.
What the new law demands
The new law requires firms selling pooled investments with healthcare claims to register, publish audited accounts and explain whether returns are guaranteed. It gives existing operators 90 days to apply, but bars them from taking new money during that period unless they receive interim approval. The FCCB says GivaCare had no such approval when it issued its warning.
“I did not buy a lottery ticket. I thought I was helping put a scanner in a town that needed one,” Maček said in an interview at a Hyderabad café. She says she used savings set aside for her parents’ future medical costs and wants the company to publish a timetable for withdrawals, not another projected return.
The law cannot make anyone’s money appear, but it can stop a health promise from being sold as a guaranteed investment.
Carita Fredriksson, FCCB consumer-protection panel member
Carita Fredriksson said the board had received 2,300 complaints since July, including reports from investors who could not identify which clinics or machines backed their purchases. She stressed that the warning is not a finding of fraud: regulators are checking the product’s accounts and whether its sales claims meet the new rules.
Clinics caught in the pitch
The dispute has unsettled diagnostic businesses that say they were named in sales material without agreeing to accept investment proceeds. Jack Molenaar, who manages a private testing centre in Hyderabad’s Ameerpet district, said a sales representative once asked to photograph his reception area. The centre has no contract with GivaCare and has received no equipment through the scheme.
Molenaar said the distinction matters to patients who may assume a clinic is backed by the investment plan. “People come here asking whether their deposit paid for our machines. We have to tell them we have never seen that money,” he said. His centre has put a notice at its front desk explaining that it is not affiliated with GivaCare.
The company says it is cooperating with the board and disputes the implication that its healthcare links were merely promotional. In an emailed response, it said customer funds were allocated to a “network of diagnostic capacity”, while declining to provide a clinic-by-clinic breakdown. It says withdrawals are delayed by a review of its payment system and that customers will receive an update by 15 October.
Public-health specialists say the episode could make small clinics more cautious about outside financing, even as many need costly scanners and laboratory equipment. Gertrude M. Huels, a health-finance researcher interviewed in Hyderabad, said the new registration rules could help patients distinguish a genuine equipment loan from an investment pitch, but warned that compliance costs may favour larger hospital chains.
The FCCB says firms covered by the law must file by 30 December, and it plans to publish a searchable register of approved health-linked products. Maček says she will wait for that list before committing more money to any care-related scheme. For now, she wants the regulator to establish which clinics, if any, received the funds she invested.
