India’s expenditure on healthcare remains barely one per cent of the GDP despite a 28 per cent increase in the amount allocated for health. The Finance Ministry has allocated Rs 47,353 crore this year in comparison to Rs 37,061 crore in 2016-17, later revised to Rs 38,343 crore.
While Union Health Minister J P Nadda said the ‘enhanced allocation’ will strengthen the ministry’s activities towards providing universal healthcare, experts said it still is a distant dream.
In 2016-17, Rs 1,312 was spent on an individual’s healthcare, by both the Centre and individual states. “Now, per capita health spending will increase marginally to about Rs 1,400. We have been demanding a health budget that will at least be 2.5 per cent of the GDP. There is a general failure in allocation,” said Ravi Duggal, health economist, Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, New Delhi.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s slip up when he announced leprosy will be eliminated by 2018 did not go unnoticed, considering the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare announced the elimination of leprosy at a national level in 2005.
The budget also ambitiously talked of upgrading over 1.5 lakh sub-centres into Primary Health Centres (PHCs), but currently only 9,197 PHCs of the existing 25,308 are fully functional.
To “ensure adequate availability of specialist doctors to strengthen secondary and tertiary levels of healthcare, we have decided to take steps to create additional 5,000 post graduate medical seats per annum,” Jaitley said in his Budget speech. Previous and current governments have only been increasing medical seats despite a lack of infrastructure. FM also announced setting up of two new All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Jharkhand and Gujarat, even as the previously announced AIIMS in Bhopal, Rishikesh, and Patna are facing a delay.
However, few initiatives seems promising such as lowering prices of drug and medical devices. “We propose to amend the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules to ensure availability of drugs at reasonable prices and promote use of generic medicines. New rules for regulating medical devices will be internationally harmonised and attract investment into this sector. This will reduce the cost of such devices,” Jaitley said.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) will receive around eight per cent more funds in the next fiscal, having been allocated
Rs 1,428.65 crore.
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