HEALTH
Healthcare: India’s Most Neglected Sector As per the government only, India needs an investment of $200 billion by 2025 to meet the global norms of three beds per 1,000 people, as per our estimates. By Santosh Sharma
A
t times, the most important things are least talked about. India’s healthcare system both in urban and rural sector is a state of tatters and also in dire need of funds to employ more doctors and nurses and build more hospitals and better run primary health centers in rural sector. Moreover, India is among the countries having the lowest public healthcare budget in the world, with the public healthcare system in the country merely getting 1.26% of the total GDP. Compare this with countries like the United Kingdom, Netherlands, New Zealand, Finland and Australia where all these countries spend over nine percent of their total GDP in public healthcare system, while countries like the United States spends over 16% of their GDP in public healthcare, and
Japan, Canada, France, Germany and Switzerland spend about 10%. Even some of the developing countries of the world have more contribution towards the public healthcare system with regards to their GDP compared to India. For example, Brazil has a total budget of over 8% of its total GDP towards public healthcare expenditure. Even neighbouring countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan have over 3% of their GDP going towards public healthcare system. The National Health Policy of 2017 recommends government expenditure on health to be increased to 2.5% of GDP by 2025, but that seems to be a distant dream still, since to reach the set target limit, the country needs to increase its health budget by 0.35% each year from now on. On the contrary, between 2015-16 to 2020-
32 JUNE-2021 NATIONAL POLITICAL MIRROR
21 there has just been a mere increase of 0.02% in the health budget in India. The National Policy also recommended that expenditure on health by states should be increased to 8% or more of their budget by 2020, but looking at the budget of different states in 2020-21, none of the larger states have allocated the stated budget. On an average, the state governments in India have just allocated 5.4% of their total budget. Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Haryana, Bihar and Punjab have allocated less than 5% of their total budget towards public healthcare between 2015-2021 financial year. Even in the Healthcare Access and Quality Index released by the medical journal Lancet in 2018, India ranked 145th out of the 195 countries in terms of quality and accessibility to
