National Health Policy In India

The current state of health in India is tied directly to the country’s history. While traditional medicine, specifically Ayurveda, has existed in India for thousands of years, the subcontinent lacked a formal health system until the arrival of the British in the 17th century. The first Western medical professionals arrived on British East India Company ships in 1608, and in 1664 the Madras General Hospital opened as India’s first hospital, serving only British soldiers. The East India Company established colonial rule in 1757 then founded the first medical department seven years later. Over the next 200 years of colonization, the British built many hospitals, health centers, and medical schools as well as creating many laws and policies standardizing

Instead, it focused on primary care, socioeconomic factors influencing health, and community participation (National Health Policy 1983). However, because the document was more of a vision statement than an action plan, there were few tangible goals or practical applications undertaken. Though the amount of health care infrastructure increased, there was low utilization due to lack of personnel, resources, and monitoring. When the World Bank and other entities starting emphasizing cost effectiveness and vertical interventions in the 1990s, the country moved farther from the goal of universal coverage. This decline in public healthcare access, coupled with huge increases in private facilities only accessible to the wealthy, increased disparities in access to care (Shukla and Duggal 2006). In response, the country created a new National Health Policy in 2002, containing lofty goals, such as increasing the utilization of public facilities to 75% of total health care usage (National Health Policy 2002). However, the policy again contained no explicit strategies for attaining those goals and further decline in the public healthcare system and exponential growth in the private sector followed. Subsequently, several new programs have been implemented to attempt to meet the needs of vulnerable populations, such as the National Rural Health Mission in 2005 and the National Programme for Healthcare of the Elderly in 2011, however, these programs have not had a large impact in reducing disparity and increasing overall population health. In 2015 the government began to draft a new version of the National Health Policy which aims to solve these problems by providing universal health care, but this new version has not yet become law (Lahariya and Menabde