Neglect of health and education across budgets is self-defeating

Budget allocations for health and education have seen only marginal increases, much lower than what is needed to improve India’s human capital to global standards. The neglect of the social sector is not a wise strategy in the long run for a young country with poor quality of human resources

Dipa Sinha

July 16, 2024 / 15:55 IST

The Budget for 2024-25 marks the inaugural significant economic policy statement of the Modi 3.0 government, aiming to outline India's path toward achieving developed nation status by 2047.

Budget 2024 is just a continuation of the priorities that were set in the previous budgets of this government. While there is a further increase in capital expenditure, urgently required allocations in the social sector have not been made once again. While this is just a vote-on-account and not a full budget, from Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s speech and the budget allocations it seems as if meeting the targets for spending on education and health are not amongst the priority issues for this government.

Although the National Health Policy, 2017 aimed at spending at least 2.5 percent of the GDP on health, the central government’s allocation for health (which is only a third of overall public health spending in the country) has remained stagnant.

The budget allocation for the department of health and family welfare is Rs 86,175 crore, only about Rs 3,000 crore higher from last year’s allocation of Rs 83,000 crore. The revised estimates (RE) are even lower at Rs76,730 crore indicating that even less than what was allocated might be spent. This despite there being huge vacancies in the government health facilities.

The latest Rural Health Statistics report of the Ministry of Health reveals that “14.4 percent of the sanctioned posts of HW (Female)/ANM (at sub-centres (SCs) & primary health centres (PHCs)) are vacant as compared to 40.2 percent vacancies of Health Worker (Male) in 2022 at SCs. At PHCs, 37 percent of the sanctioned posts of Health Assistant (Male & Female) and 23.8 percent of the sanctioned posts of Doctors are vacant in 2022”.

Similarly, high vacancies plague urban health centres, the anganwadi programme (for children under six). Other schemes which include cash-based entitlements such as the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) for pregnant women or the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) for the aged, single women and disabled have also seen stagnant budgets over the last few years despite inflation, with the real value of the transfers declining overtime.