Low-income nations spend more than India on health

India’s public health expenditure — 1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) — may have witnessed a marginal improvement from 0.98% in 2014, but it is still way behind even the low-income countries that spend 1.4% on an average, shows National Health Profile 2018.

India is spending even less than some of its neighbours countries such as Bhutan (2.5%), Sri Lanka (1.6%) and Nepal (1.1%), according to the annual report prepared by the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence, the wing of the directorate general of health services in the Union ministry of health and family welfare, which released it on Tuesday.

In World Health Organization’s South-East Asian Region, which includes 10 nations, India is second last, above only Bangladesh (0.4%).

Maldives spends 9.4% of its GDP on health to claim the top spot, followed by Thailand (2.9%). The data was collated from various sources, including the WHO, which puts India’s public health expenditure at 1%.

India’s National Health Policy 2017 proposes raising the public health expenditure to 2.5% of the GDP by 2025.

“We are working on it and are hopeful of meeting the target. It won’t happen overnight but we are on the right track.

If you look at the healthcare indicators such as maternal and infant mortality rate, we are improving at a greater rate than the global target,” Union health minister Jagat Prakash Nadda said.

Shortage of doctors is still a problem, with one allopathic doctor for 11,082 people in the country’s villages, as per the report.