Post Budget Quote 2018 – Suparna Diwakar, Co-founder, The Indian School of Development Management (ISDM)
“A very populist budget from the government. Clearly, the highlight of the health sector budget is the National Flagship healthcare protection scheme with approximately 50 crore beneficiaries and a cover of upto Rs 5 lakh per family. While it is one of the largest ever government-funded healthcare programmes in the world, the programme only caters to secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation. The overall budget allocations to health, education and social sector sees an increase of only 0.16 lakh crore which at 1.38 Lakh crore is less than 1% of the total GDP of India in 2016.
In the past 3 years, there have been considerable efforts by the government towards building the health facilities infrastructure upto the HSC level. However, the health delivery system continues to face severe challenges due to lack of appropriate and enough HR deployed on the ground. The budget announces concentrated efforts towards enabling an increase in the number of medical colleges. However, addressing the HR/ talent gap through appropriate and incentivised deployment across multiple levels in healthcare service delivery will be one of the biggest challenges for the government, especially in the context of National Flagship healthcare protection scheme”.
