Prime Minister Narendra Modi seen visiting Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital after India crossed the 1-billion Covid-19-vaccine dose milestone.
Credit: PTI File Photo
The Union Budget for 2024-25 is set to be unveiled on February 1. Since 2024 is an election year, the upcoming budget will be an interim one.
Government's expenditure on health will again be in focus as it has been since the Covid-19 outbreak.
Ever since the Modi government came into power in 2014, India's health budget has seen a consistent increase. In the past decade, the expenditure by the Union government on health has seen a little less than a three-fold rise.
The massive vaccination programme and the launch of the Ayushman Bharat Yojana, under which those eligible have a defined benefit cover of ₹5 lakh per family per year, have been projected as the two major achievements in the health sector by the government.
Even though the expenditure on healthcare was consistently increasing over the years, including under the Narendra Modi government, the real push came with the pandemic.
The Union government spent around Rs 63,000 crore on health in the fiscal year 2019-20. The budget estimates for the next fiscal, 2020-21, was along the similar lines. However, as pandemic cases rose, so did the expenditure on health.
From 63,420 crore the spending shot up to Rs 80,020 crore in 2020-21, and further up to around Rs 84,090 crore in the next fiscal.
In the revised estimates for 2022-23, the spending on health came down to around Rs 77,000 crore. However in the last year's budget, the allocation for health crossed even the pandemic levels. The budget estimate for 2023-24 was put close to Rs 89,000 crore.
The budget for the upcoming year in the health sector and the actual expenditure for the year gone by will be out soon.