New Delhi: The government allocated Rs 6,400 crore towards implementing Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) or Ayushman Bharat - an increase of Rs 4,000 crore from the previous financial year. But even this, a senior official of the health ministry said, might not be enough.
Although the scheme featured in finance minister Piyush Goyal’s budget speech, he didn’t announce the actual increase in the budget. Claiming that a “massive scale up in health care” had taken place in the past five years, and said, “We launched the world’s largest healthcare programme, Ayushman Bharat, to provide medical treatment to nearly 50 crore people. Already close to 10 lakh patients have benefited from the medical treatment which would have cost them Rs 3,000 crore through free treatment made available under the scheme.”
The government had initially allocated Rs 1,200 crore for the scheme and the raise accounts for half of the increase in the entire health ministry’s budget - but officials said that it was Rs 1,000 crore short of what is actually required. “The requirement for the next financial year is around Rs 7,400 crore while the allocation for the year after would be an additional Rs 1,000 crore,” said a senior official of the ministry.
The official added, “The struggle for funds is a key problem. Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh have both written to us asking for funds to be disbursed, which hasn’t happened yet.”
The ambitious scheme that the government claims will lead to a momentous shift in healthcare in the country aims to provide medical coverage of up to Rs 5 lakh per family in a year to 11 crore (100 million) eligible families or nearly 50 crore (500 million) people.
Earlier in March 2018, health minister JP Nadda had claimed that a total of Rs 10,000 crore had initially been allocated for the scheme’s implementation until 2020.
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