India’s health budget may rise after minister warns of funding crunch

NEW DELHI: India’s health ministry is likely to see a substantial increase in funding, after it warned that its programmes were short of cash and sought more than US$1.2 billion in additional money, according to government officials and documents seen by Reuters.

The final numbers could change when Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presents the budget for fiscal 2017/18 on Wednesday.

But one official familiar with the numbers said the health ministry is expected to get a US$1.5 billion, or 27 per cent, increase in funding to around US$7 billion.

The health and finance ministries did not respond to requests for comment.

An increase in the budget allocation, if finalized, would signal an acknowledgment from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration that the country needs to ramp up spending on the sector.

Successive administrations have faced criticism from public health advocates for spending only around 1 per cent of India’s gross domestic product on public health, less in percentage terms than countries like Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.

More than a million Indian children die every year before reaching the age of five.

Hundreds of millions of poor people rely on India’s public health programmes which provide basic services like vaccinations, disease prevention and free drugs.

Until May last year, Jagat Prakash Nadda, the federal health minister, had publicly maintained that the sector had no funding issues but needed to get better at spending the money it had.

Between 2005 and 2013, the ministry only once spent all of its allocated funds.

But letters sent by his ministry to the finance ministry between June and January, not previously disclosed, show that Nadda has also come around to the view that his department needs a larger pot to meet its public health objectives.

“These are the bare minimum requirements,” Nadda wrote in a letter to Jaitley on Jan. 10, outlining his request for additional funds. “There are several other significant programmes experiencing paucity of financial resources.”

The government has been increasing allocation to the health sector after criticism over its social sector cuts in 2015.

But pressures on the budget are rising. It must also step up spending on roads, railways and irrigation projects to stimulate growth while keeping the fiscal deficit in check.

In his letter, Nadda wrote that he needed an extra US$589 million to implement a programme to screen patients for cancer and other illnesses, while the HIV/ AIDS treatment programme required an infusion of US$74 million.

Nadda also wrote that there was an ‘urgent requirement’ of around US$520 million for the current year’s spending, the absence of which “will adversely impact key programmes like malaria, tuberculosis, polio and other vector borne disease”. — Reuters