After dealing with a pandemic for over a year now, it was evident that the budget for healthcare needed to be expanded. We have experienced the need for better healthcare in the country and hence the setting up of 17,000 rural and 11,000 urban health and wellness centres is a great step. But, when we look at the figures, the allocation of healthcare budget, is a very slight increase of 5.7 per cent to Rs 67,484 crores as compared to the last year’s Rs 63,830 crores. This is lesser than the target spending of 2.5 per cent of GDP on healthcare. Another major need of the hour was to dedicate budgets towards data protection to set up an infrastructure in order to safeguard all the online data saved in the healthcare sector. On the positive side, the PM Atma Nirbhar Swasthya Bharat Yojana to develop primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare systems is a promising step towards developing better healthcare infrastructure in the country.
