Will health finally find its day in the sun? That's the hope
Innovation and entrepreneurship to solve India's pressing problems are core to Forbes India, and this Special Issue on health (and healthtech) delves into areas that are both immediate and futuristic
Perhaps one way to gauge India’s focus on health would be to look back at the ministers in charge of the crucial portfolio post-Independence. It seemed to have started well. The country’s first minster of health and family welfare was Amrit Kaur, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, a member of the Constituent Assembly, and an advocate for women’s rights.
As health minister when nation-building was the priority, the Oxford University-educated Kaur was pivotal in setting up the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). She was also at the forefront of campaigns to rein in malaria and tuberculosis and spearheaded the world’s largest BCG vaccine programme.
Another Gandhian in charge of the portfolio in the Nehru regime was Sushila Nayyar who, armed with degrees in public health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, set up the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, India’s first rural medical college.
Yet, when it came to expenditure on health, it may have been meagre in the early days of the nation. The 2017 Economic Survey reckoned that “given the pressing need to redistribute, India did not invest sufficiently in human capital—for instance, public spending on health was an unusually low 0.22 percent of GDP in 1950-51”. It may have risen since but, as the Survey pointed out, the “little over 1 percent” of GDP is well below the world average of 5.99 percent.
Try recollecting the last time, pre-Covid, an election campaign that had health as an issue. What is more, but for a handful of notable exceptions, health ministers rarely had backgrounds connected to health, and an actor in charge of the portfolio in the early 2000s was clearly not what the doctor ordered.
(This story appears in the 30 July, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
