MUMBAI : India’s annual budget left the healthcare industry disappointed. The two areas that received a boost from the finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget were tele-mental health centres and the National Digital Health Ecosystem that is expected to digitize health records and create health identity for Indians.
The measures, experts said, were inadequate to tackle the immensity of the country’s crisis. Allocation to the health ministry in the FY23 budget rose by ₹1,000 crore to ₹83,000 crore from this fiscal year’s revised estimates of ₹82,000 crore.
The department of health research was allocated ₹3,200 crore, an increase from the revised estimates of ₹3,080 crore of the current fiscal.
The finance ministry allocated ₹690 crore for future pandemic preparedness as part of the Prime Minister’s Ayushman Bharat Health Infrastructure Mission-BioSecurity Preparedness and strengthening pandemic research.