Health Ministry signs MoU with Electronics Ministry to facilitate access of Ayushman Bharat

The National Health Agency (NHA) under the Health Ministry, which is the apex body for the implementation of Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission, inked an MoU with the Electronics and IT Ministry to provide information and eligibility validation services to the beneficiaries, especially in remote areas.

Health Minister J P Nadda and Minister for Law and Justice and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad presided over the signing ceremony.

The MoU was signed by Indu Bhushan, CEO, National Health Agency (NHA) and Dinesh Tyagi, CEO, CSC-SPV.

"With this MoU, the dream of Digital India is taking a big leap. The Ayushman Bharat shall benefit 55 crore people across the country. The 3 lakh CSCs in 2.5 lakh Panchayats shall be a great help in the implementation of the scheme," Nadda said.

"Today, I'm very happy that CSC VLEs are going to be the soldiers of healthcare-Ayushman Bharat in India. The identity and registrations of beneficiaries would be done through CSCs," Prasad said.

Common Service Centres (CSCs) are physical facilities for delivering government's e-services to rural and remote locations where availability of computers and internet is negligible or mostly absent. They are multiple-services-single-point model for providing facilities for multiple transactions at a single geographical location.

As the benefits under the AB-NHPM were based on entitlement and not on enrolment, the CSCs spread across rural India could become the key point of information for potential beneficiaries and help in validating their entitlement.

Bhushan, CEO, National Health Agency (NHA), said the integration will not only create more accessibility and transparency in the beneficiary validation process, but will also spread awareness among the targeted beneficiaries.

AB-NHPM targets approximately 10.74 crore poor, deprived families and has identified occupational category of urban workers' families as per the latest Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) data, for both rural and urban India.