Budget 2018: India's healthcare crisis is holding back national potential
Budget 2018:
India has the world’s highest population of stunted children–short for their age–and the country’s failing primary healthcare and overburdened tertiary care are ill-equipped to handle the crisis of childhood malnutrition, leaving India unable to fulfil its national potential. This is the backdrop against which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will present his government’s last full budget before the general elections in 2019. Although India’s stunting rate has declined nearly 10 percentage points in a decade–from 48% in 2005-06 to 38.4% in 2015-16, an estimated 48 million Indian children are still stunted. At a time of declining economic growth and jobs, these children may have a greater disadvantage over those in other emerging nations with lower malnutrition and better healthcare. In addition, Inadequate public
healthcare and healthcare expenses push an additional 39 million people back into poverty in India every year, this 2011 Lancet paper said. Stunting is the percentage of children aged 0-59 months whose height for age is below minus two standard deviations from the median of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Child Growth Standards. It reflects chronic undernutrition. Countries with high rates of stunting are likely to be less prosperous, according to a recent report. “Until the federal government in India takes health as seriously as many other nations do, India will not fulfil either its national or global potential,” said a November 2017 editorial published in the Lancet, a medical journal. India spends 1.4% of GDP on health, less than Nepal, Sri Lanka The Centre’s allocation for health rose 24% to Rs 473.53 billion in 2017-18–from Rs 383.43 billion in 2016-17. This is 1.15% of India’s gross domestic product (GDP). Including the expenditure by states, India spends 1.4% of its GDP on health.Mental health still largely ignored Allocation to the National Programme for Mental Health has been stagnant for the past three years. At Rs 350 million, the programme received 0.07% of India’s 2017-18 health budget. This is despite the fact that an estimated 10-20 million Indians (1-2% of the population) suffer from severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and nearly 50 million (5% of population)–almost equal to the population of South Africa–suffer from common mental disorders such as depression and anxiety, as IndiaSpend reported in September 2016. Despite 15 suicides every hour and 133,623 suicides in 2015, India is short of 66,200 psychiatrists and 269,750 psychiatrist nurses. “Today, nearly 70% of the meagre mental health spending goes to mental institutions,” Ala Alwan, Assistant Director-General of Non-communicable Diseases and Mental Health at the WHO, told the Quint. “If countries spent more at the primary care level, they would be able to reach more people, and start to address problems early enough to reduce the need for expensive hospital care.”