The much awaited day of year is coming near at hand. The all guesses are flying around about the coming budget. Whether this will be a populist budget, election budget, industry oriented budget or a balanced one.
The expectations are quite high from finance minister. So, he has a daunting task of making everyone happy. As a finance minister of a fast growing nation he may be a very happy person after looking at the growth figures for last few years.But, very irony of this growth portrays a completely different and sad story. Despite of this tremendous growth India has slipped form Rank 126 to Rank 128 in Human Development Index(HDI) published by UN. It puts a very strong question mark on our development.
The biggest reasons behind our low HDI are poor literacy and poor health services(reflected as low life expectancy at birth). Minister sir this is the high time when you should look at pathetic public health services of our country. It is a very well known fact that public health expenditure as percentage of GDP in India is far lower than that of developed nation and even as compare to some of the developing nation. SO, in order to improve the public health services, more budgetary allocation is required. A vast majority of this country\'s population is dependent on public health services. We need to have more hospitals equipped with modern facilities and qualified doctors. Doctors are real scarce resources in our country. To address this issue please allocate some funds towards starting medical colleges. Just the Ramadoss\' stunt of sending doctors to rural areas will not improve the rural health scenario. We need to have more doctors. So, Budget must have some means to add more medical college every year.
You should look at providing some mechanism to make medical insurance accessible to the masses of the country. Currently medical insurance is accessible only to urban people. Hardly any rural people has medical insurance. But while announcing any scheme you should be careful about its implementability. The scheme must deliver what it is expected to.
So, my request to you is to please do something in your budget to improve the public health system. You should look at HDI also as a growth reflector and just be feeling proud by looking at GDP growth rate.