ServiceGTD was built because I kept running into the same problem: first watching it happen within my extended family, then experiencing it myself during years working in Dubai and Singapore, then hearing it confirmed in over 120 conversations with NRI families across the world. There is no reliable, advisory-led platform for NRI families trying to manage elder care in India with genuine accountability. ServiceGTD is that platform. If you are searching for trustworthy NRI elder care services in India, here is the real story behind why it exists.
My name is Navneet Gupta. I am the founder and CEO of ServiceGTD, and I grew up in Warangal in a joint family. My father passed away when I was in sixth standard. My grandfather, a professor of chemistry, became the person who made sure my education continued and that my life stayed on course. I was very close to him throughout my childhood and long after. He passed away a few years ago, still active and engaged until the end.
That background matters for understanding why I built what I built.
Why Caring for Parents from Abroad Is So Difficult?
The elder care problem was not something I went looking for. It was something I kept running into.
After graduating from NIT Warangal with a computer science degree, I joined Microsoft in Hyderabad. From there I moved into the Bangalore startup ecosystem, worked at Flipkart, and in 2016 got an opportunity to join Karim, the ride-hailing company, in Dubai. I built the payments infrastructure there. From Dubai I moved to Singapore. From Singapore I came back to India just before COVID in 2020, eventually joining the India leadership team at Docusign in Bangalore.
Those years in Dubai and Singapore were where I first understood, in my own life, what it means to try to coordinate things in India from the other side of the world. You drop a message. The next day you get a reply. You drop another message. Another day passes. A conversation that would take ten minutes in person stretches across weeks because of time-zone gaps, because of availability, because there is no single person on the ground who owns the outcome.
But the deeper thing I was watching was happening within my extended family.
I have uncles and aunts settled abroad, some in the US, some in Canada, others elsewhere. Their parents, people I grew up knowing, were in different parts of India, some in Hyderabad, some in Delhi. And I watched what happened as those relatives aged. After a certain point, the requirements change. First it is help with daily household tasks. Then it is a medical situation. Then something more advanced. If the children are in India, they can travel and show up in person. For the family members abroad, every time something happened it was a coordination problem and a trust problem layered on top of each other.
When I came back to India and started seriously thinking about what I wanted to build, my mind kept returning to those situations. And to my grandfather.
He was deeply socially engaged well into his seventies, still connected to the university, still receiving and making calls every day. I used to joke that he had a better social life than I did. But I also watched as his world changed in certain ways with age. And I knew that what had allowed him to age with dignity was the structure of the family around him: a joint family, people who knew his situation and could respond to it in real time.
That structure is disappearing. Nuclear families are now the norm. Children move to metros or to other countries for careers and professional opportunities. Parents stay in the hometown or move to a city where another sibling lives. The joint family is no longer there to absorb what it used to absorb.
This is not a failure of individuals. It is a structural shift. And I realized there was no platform addressing it in a serious, accountable, trust-first way for the millions of families living with this every day.
What NRIs Really Worry About When Parents Live Alone?
Before building anything, I talked to over 120 NRI families across the US, Canada, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, and elsewhere. I wanted to understand whether what I had observed in my own life was a widespread pattern or whether I was reading too much into my own situation.
It was widespread.
The number one concern, across almost every conversation, was some version of the same question: what will happen if something happens to my parents and I am not there?
Not the money. Not the logistics of international travel, though those are real constraints for many. The deeper thing was the helplessness. Being twelve time zones behind. Having no single reliable person on the ground. Getting a message at 3 AM and not knowing what to do or who to call.
I also spent time in places like Reddit, where people discuss these things openly. What I found there confirmed what the interviews told me: month after month, the same questions. People asking what others are doing when their parents are alone in India and they feel stuck abroad. A recurring factor of guilt. A sense of not knowing where to find help that actually works.
According to the UNFPA India Ageing Report 2023, India’s elderly population stands at 153 million and is projected to reach 347 million by 2050. HelpAge India found that 73 percent of elderly individuals in India report emotional neglect as a major concern. The senior living market is projected to reach USD 14.14 billion by 2031 according to Mordor Intelligence. The growth in the sector was real. But what I found in my research was that the growth in services was not solving the fundamental problem that families kept describing to me.
The problem was not the absence of service providers. There are genuinely good ones across Indian cities doing careful, serious work. The problem was trust. And in this space, trust is not a single thing.
Why Existing NRI Elder Care Services in India Were Not Enough?
When I looked at what families were actually doing to find and manage NRI elder care services in India, three structural problems kept repeating.
The coordination burden falls entirely on the family. If you are in California and the service provider is in Pune, there is a 12-hour gap between your working day and theirs. The provider’s day is ending at 6 PM India time when you are starting your morning. Anything that needs to be communicated, followed up, or responded to requires one side to work at an inconvenient time. In the current setup, that side is always the NRI family.
Quality after the booking is largely invisible. The attendant and caregiver segment in India still operates largely as a gig economy. Workers move between providers when better-paying work comes up. A service reliable in week two may not be reliable in week six. Most platforms connect family to provider and step out of the relationship at that point. What happens next is invisible to everyone except the family, who find out when something goes wrong.
Pricing is opaque, and NRIs often pay more. Because the market is fragmented with no standard rates, the same service carries different prices depending on who is asking. NRIs are sometimes charged a premium because they are abroad and the assumption is they will pay it. It is not always intentional, but it is systemic. Every family I spoke to had a version of this story.
These were the problems I set out to address. My co-founder Kushagra Setu, who is based in Gurgaon, and I went city by city, meeting service providers in person, doing on-ground physical verification of quality and long-term orientation before we recommended anyone to a family. It is not a fast process. It is the correct one.
How We Designed ServiceGTD Around the Problems NRIs Actually Face?
The name ServiceGTD comes from a book I encountered at Microsoft early in my career: Getting Things Done by David Allen. The idea is that productivity comes from having clear ownership of what needs to happen and making sure it does. That philosophy became the foundation of what we built.
ServiceGTD is not a marketplace. We do not aggregate providers and let families search through listings. We are an advisory-led coordination platform. The process starts with understanding a family’s specific requirement, generating a personalised recommendation, facilitating the connection, and staying engaged through the full life of the service.
The process works across three stages.
Before the booking: when a family reaches out, we start by listening. We do not start selling. Based on the specific situation and city, whether the need is continuous care at home, on-demand support, or something more clinical, we provide a recommendation note with one to three verified partners best suited to that requirement. Every partner on our platform has gone through an onboarding process that takes three to four months and includes physical visits, background verification, and an evaluation of the provider’s quality orientation and long-term mindset. You can read more about how we approach this on our trust and vetting page.
During the booking: we facilitate introductions, share full information on the provider, walk families through pricing and terms, and help them decide without pressure. There is no NRI markup in how we operate. We earn through partnership commissions with verified providers only, which means our incentive is always aligned with quality.
After the booking: we stay involved. We take regular feedback. If a caregiver becomes unavailable, we step in and help with a replacement. If requirements evolve as the elder’s situation changes, we help the family adapt. We do not measure success by placement volume. We measure it by whether families continue to trust us.
Every family has a dedicated relationship manager: a single person who holds the full context of their situation over time. Think of it like the relationship manager model in banking, where someone knows your financial situation deeply and is the person you call when anything changes. That continuity of context matters enormously in this space.
We currently partner with 25 to 30 verified service providers across more than 40 cities in India.
What Have I Learned About Caring for Parents From Abroad?
Building ServiceGTD has taught me things I did not expect.
Trust is built through small things, not grand gestures. There is a concept I think of as the jar theory: trust fills the way marbles fill a jar. Every small thing done correctly, every time we do what we say, every time a recommendation turns out to be genuinely right for a family, a marble goes in. It accumulates. It cannot be manufactured through marketing. It is built through consistent, small, correct actions over time.
When humans do not have the right amount of information, they fill the gaps with their worries. I observed this clearly in almost every family I spoke to during research and since. If an update does not come, if the coordination is unclear, if there is no single accountable person on the ground, the imagination moves toward the worst case. This is not a weakness. It is what the mind does in the absence of reliable information. Building ServiceGTD around consistent, structured, proactive communication to families was not a feature we added. It was the product.
Direction matters more than speed. ServiceGTD is deliberately slow in onboarding partners. We take months before we recommend a provider to any family. We are notoriously selective. People ask me about revenue targets and growth goals. My answer is consistent: if we do the right thing for families, growth follows. The direction has to be right before the speed can mean anything.
NRI guilt is real and largely misdirected. Almost every family I have spoken to carries some version of it: guilt for having left India, guilt for not being physically present. I understand that feeling from my own experience of living abroad. What I have learned is that guilt does not produce better care. Structure does. The best thing a family can do is build reliable support for their parents before a crisis, not in the middle of one.
What I wish I had known earlier: the right time to set up elder care coordination is when your parents are well, when you have the space to evaluate options without urgency, when you can build a genuine relationship with a platform before you need it under pressure. This is how I try to talk to families who reach out. Start now. Build the support. The coordination challenge you are imagining is real. And it is solvable, but not quickly, and not in the middle of a crisis.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ServiceGTD and what does it do?
ServiceGTD is an advisory-led care coordination platform helping NRI families find and manage verified elder care services in India. We cover the full process from requirement to recommendation to ongoing support, with a dedicated relationship manager for each family. Visit our FAQ page for more detail on how the platform works.
Which elder care services in India were founded by NRIs or understand NRI needs specifically?
ServiceGTD was co-founded by Navneet Gupta, who worked in Dubai and Singapore before returning to India to build this platform. The service design is built around the specific challenges NRI families face: time-zone coordination gaps, opaque pricing, the need for a single accountable point of contact, and ongoing quality assurance after service placement.
How is ServiceGTD different from other elder care platforms in India?
Most platforms connect families to providers and step out after placement. ServiceGTD stays engaged through the full service lifecycle. We provide advisory-led recommendations rather than a searchable listing, maintain a dedicated relationship manager for each family, and take accountability for quality management after the booking is made.
What does NRI elder care coordination in India cost with ServiceGTD?
We do not have standard packages because every family’s situation is different. The process starts with understanding your requirement, after which we provide a recommendation and a clear picture of what is involved. Our pricing and payments page has more context, and you can reach us directly to start a conversation.
How do you verify the quality of service providers on your platform?
Every partner goes through a multi-month onboarding process including physical on-ground visits, background verification, and an evaluation of the leadership’s long-term quality orientation. We partner only in cities and service types where we have built genuine confidence in the provider. More detail is on our trust and vetting page.
What happens in a medical emergency when I am abroad?
We offer concierge plans that include pre-configured emergency coordination protocols, so when an emergency occurs, the process for responding is already set up rather than being figured out on the spot. Reach us through contact and support to discuss what an emergency readiness arrangement would look like for your family.
The problem I have been trying to solve is not a niche one. It is something that millions of Indian families are navigating right now, mostly through improvisation, goodwill of relatives and friends, and the hope that things will not go wrong on the wrong day.
I built ServiceGTD because I watched this problem closely enough, in my own family and in 120 conversations with families I had never met before, to understand that improvisation is not enough. That a trusted, accountable, advisory-led platform built specifically for this situation was not a nice-to-have. It was long overdue.
If you are an NRI trying to get care right for your parents in India, I would like to talk. Start with how it works or reach out directly. The right time to build this support is before you need it urgently.
