A health budget of no substance

After listening to the finance minister speak about the health budget I was really happy that Rs 223846 crore is allocated for healthcare On reading the fine print one is shocked to discover that Rs 60030 crore for clean water and sanitation and Rs 2700 crore for nutrition which were being spent under other ministries have now been labelled as health spends The health ministry spent Rs 78000 crore last year and the outlay on health this financial year is Rs 71269 crore So itrsquos actually less than what was needed last yearI wonder if friends in the industry felt a similar roller coaster of emotions after hearing about the R2 lakhcrorebailout package announced in the Bounce Back Bharat which just turned out to be a whole lot of bank loans instead of real help to businessesI had hoped that the pandemic would be a wake up call for the government and become a landmark moment in Indian healthcare Indian government hospitals and primary health centres need to be improved We must spend more on upgrading infrastructure including hospital wards operation theatres intensive care units neonatal ICUs and provide ambulance services across the length and breadth of the countryIn September last year I started a petition asking the finance minister to allocate more for healthcare Almost 2 lakh people signed the petition Any one reading this article knows the state of public healthcare in India The sad joke that is an Indian reality ndash a pizza gets delivered in 30 minutes but no such guarantee for an ambulance if someone has a heart attack or stroke at homeHow many of you have tried getting admitted in a government hospital for a minor procedure Donrsquot you wish for them to be upgraded and become at par with private hospitalsASHA and anganwadi workers who work at the grassroots level and ensure all the government schemes for maternal and child health reach the end user are given a salary of Rs 2000Rs 4500 This is not even one third of minimum wages Often these workers are not paid salaries for six months at a stretch If we donrsquot increase the health budget how do we expect to improve healthcare on the ground No one can work for free and health services like everything else cost money I think it is very important that policy makers understand the importance of health in an attempt to improve the economic parametres of the nationThe Haryana government recently increased the cost of medical education in its government colleges from Rs 4 lakh to R40 lakh with a bond and the UP government has announced a bond of Rs 1 crore for postgraduates failing to work in government hospitals for seven years Such kind of tactics will make medicine a less attractive profession for studentsCentral council for Indian medicine recently permitted Ayurveda doctors to do 58 types of modern surgeries in the hope that healthcare reaches people living in the peripheries I had rather hoped that we would work on a blueprint of a healthier Bharat where every Indian got access to quality healthcare irrespective of where they lived Unscientifically mixing specialities like Ayurveda and Modern Medicine doesnrsquot seem to be the answer to holistic healingIndia spends about 16 per cent of its GDP on health compared to 1418 per cent in developed nations and 6 per cent in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka Last year the finance minister had said that they hope to increase it to 25 per cent by 2025 but other than the R35000 crore kept aside for the COVID vaccination programme we are actually going to spend less on health this year than we did in 2020Itrsquos very distressing that the government refuses to learn anything from the pandemic Maybe the death of 740 doctors and 152 lakh citizens has not acted as a wake up call to treat health as priority expenditure Then what willDr Sarika Verma is an ENT surgeon from Gurgaon