Count Down to Budget. Social sector ranks high on rhetoric, low on Budget priority

Digitisation, the GST, and Make in India have led the narrative through the second year of the Narednra Modi-led government. Health, education and rural development, however, have been left on the back burner.

Despite a strong rhetorical focus on the social sector, the past two Budgets have been strikingly underwhelming, with only marginal increase in allocation, a greater push towards privatisation and lack of follow-through on Budget promises.

The health sector, for example, saw big-ticket announcements in the previous Budget — with promises such as health insurance cover of ₹1 lakh per family, with a disproportionately small allocation of just over ₹1,500 crore; a complete miss to the free medicines scheme in favour of insurance; announcement for a very specific disease, kidney failure, even as India keeps missing the targets on tuberculosis, maternal and child mortality, and others.

However, little progress appears to have been made. In the absence of “free medicines”, the announcement of 3,000 new Jan Aushadhi stores that sell generic medicines, was a positive one. However, according to the official website, only 645 such stores exist all over the country. In 2014-15, 70 per cent of the funds for developing AIIMs-like super-speciality institutes was unutilised.

“There is a huge lag between policy commitments and implementation,” said Ravi Duggal, Country Coordinator, International Budget Partnership.

The funds for health and education only narrowly increased in the Budget, which get neutralised, if considered as a percentage of the GDP; while, the outlay for food subsidy took a dip of ₹4,584 crore.

“In general, we are seeing an overall contraction because a lot of planned schemes went into disarray,” Duggal said. Under the 12th Plan Period (2012-17), the Central spending on health was supposed to be raised to 2.5 per cent of the GDP. Currently, we are not near this target.

“We don’t expect any substantial increase in Budgetary allocation towards health. The only thing that can happen is the government would move towards greater allocation to health insurance,” Duggal added.

This move, however, is expected to bring more privatisation, instead of increasing access to healthcare, critics say.

In the education space, while allocation for the crucial Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan remained nearly stagnant, the allocation for the scheme to provide education to madrasas and minorities was hacked down to almost to a third.

While Finance Minister Arun Jaitley called education one of the nine “pillars”, and sought to focus on “quality of education”, the budget for teacher training was also pulled down by a third. “There is no focus on the social sector, whether you look at the right to food, the right to education, rural employment, or PDS (public distribution system),” Duggal said.

T Sundararaman, Dean, School of Health Systems Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, added that the government is shifting to a system wherein more stimulus is provided to the private health sector.

He further added that the decrease in Central allocation in health, under the provisions of the 14th Finance Commission, and increasing the State share, has resulted in significant pains for smaller States, especially in the hilly regions, where the Central allocation was the main source of funds.

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