Last year’s healthcare Budget and vaccination drive can be seen as a good success with 70 per cent of the adult population fully vaccinated by January-2022. The current year’s Budget continues on the same streak, this time addressing mental health aspects and launching 23 tele-mental centres to provide far-reaching access across the country.
One of the more recent endeavours which has seen strong traction is the Jal Jeevan mission which continues with a higher allotment of ₹60,000 crore for the upcoming year compared to ₹50,000 crore budgeted for the previous year. The plan, originally intended for 5 years, is reporting strong traction with 5.5 crore households receiving tap water connections in the last two years and targeting 3.8 crore connections for the upcoming year.
On the health front, Department of Health & Family Welfare was allocated ₹83,000 crore or 0.32 per cent of GDP for the next year, which is 16 per cent higher allocation compared to last year. The high double-digit growth in allocation is a positive, but National Health Policy-2017 guideline of approaching 2.5 per cent of GDP may continue to be elusive at such pace of expansion in allocation. Increasing existing healthcare allocations in an economy showing high growth such as India may get increasingly tougher if delayed at earlier levels.
An amount of ₹35,000 crore was earmarked for vaccination programme which later got revised to ₹39,000 crore for 2021-22. This year’s allocation stands at ₹5,000 crore for vaccination. The Finance Minister in her speech acknowledges the milder symptoms in the current variant of the virus and the vaccine allocation also reflects a milder inoculation approach for the upcoming year. From the current vantage point, the upcoming year’s inoculation program would have to address only the remainder of the booster shots, which has already started in January-2022. But taking the foot off the pedal at such a tentative stage may signal a weak procurement strategy and may prove insufficient in any event of virus resurgence.
PM Aatmanirbhar Swasth Bharat Yojana introduced last year, intended for reinforcing public heath care centres and integrating health care surveillance, did not have additional details in the current Budget. Medical insurance scheme for the low income families, Ayushman Bharat (PM-JAY) was allocated ₹6,412 crore for the upcoming year, which remains the same from earlier year.