The New Motto: Wealth Is Health
Since the start of 2020 things have been well… gloomy to say the least. Depressing news after depressing news: the rise in poverty, rise in wealth inequality, economies contracting, people dying— all caused due to the coronavirus pandemic. The effect of the pandemic included hindrance of progress in various fields, but it sure as hell boosted one particular field.
The field: medicine. The whole world increased its focus on medicine in the race for developing the vaccine for Covid-19. In India, the government realized that more importance was to be placed on health than before.
The result? A massive increase of 137% in the health budget for 2021–22. This is also an increase from 1.2% to 2.5% of the GDP. This move could prove to be historic and greatly increase the quality and infrastructure of healthcare in the country.
The new Budget unveiled by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has an outlay of ₹2,23,846 crores for Health and Wellbeing; a massive increase from last year’s allocation of ₹94,452 crores. It set aside ₹35,000 crores for Covid-19 vaccines. The budget also features a new centrally sponsored initiative called the PM AtmaNirbhar Swasth Bharat Yojana, which has an outlay of ₹64,180 crores over six years.
The leading allocations that account for this increase are Covid vaccinations (₹35,000 crores, accounting for 27% of the increase) and water & sanitation costs (₹74,500 crores, accounting for 58% of the increase). The budget also has additional finance commission grants of ₹13,192 for health.
The initiative is aimed at developing capacities of the primary, secondary, and tertiary care health systems, strengthen existing national institutions and create new institutions, to detect and cure new diseases in the wake of the pandemic that has affected 10.7 million people and claimed more than 154,000 lives in the country. It will be in addition to the National Health Mission. All in response to the 2020 pandemic.
The healthcare industry has welcomed the increase in the budget. According to Dr. K Srinath Reddy, founder of Public Health Foundation of India-
The budget provides a much-needed boost to health, nutrition sanitation and pollution control, all of which will contribute to improved health and wellbeing. Primary health care is receiving more support, with even the previously neglected urban component getting new health and wellness centres. The strengthening of disease surveillance system across the country and entry points to the country as well as the laboratory capacity in all districts is also needed for pandemic prevention and epidemic response.
On the other side of the spectrum, the budget has also been called “misleading” by critics who say that the increase is the result of clubbing the allocations for the Ministry of AYUSH under “drinking water and sanitation” and allocations for the Covid-19 vaccine.
With all the changes (mostly unpleasant) the pandemic has brought, it seems it has now also managed to reverse the saying “health is wealth” to “wealth is health”.
