 "Nirmala Sitharaman")
Ahead of the Budget, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday said investment in research and development in medicine, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals were the need of the hour.
She also said India was fortunate to have the capacity to produce vaccines for Covid-19 for Indians and people of other countries.
“We will have to focus that India leverages its strength in this (health R& D) area, and so we will have to look at both public-private partnership and also investments in research for medicine,” Sitharaman said at an interaction organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry.
As health takes “top-notch” priority, health care and investment in it would be critical, not just to keep lives safe but also to make health and health-related expenditure more predictable for people so that they did not have to spend and some kind of provision was made for them, she said.
She urged industry to send inputs for a Budget “like never before” to help India emerge as the engine of global growth.
“Hundred years wouldn’t have seen a Budget being made post a pandemic like this,” she said.
In health, more funding is needed for infrastructure and bringing in private participation not just to build more hospitals, but also bringing in capacities to run them, Sitharaman said.
The government will consider the inputs the health sector has given for the Budget, she added.
The pandemic has uncovered inadequacies in India’s health care, and a taskforce on identifying projects for the National Infrastructure Pipeline has suggested increasing public expenditure on health to at least 2.5 per cent of GDP, which is nearly double the current rate.
The 15th Finance Commission in its first report had said the health sector, which has been underfunded for decades, saw an expenditure, the states and the Centre taken together, of only 0.95 per cent of GDP in 2017-18 against the 2.5 per cent targeted in the National Policy on Health.
Sitharaman said India was fortunate to have capacity to produce the Covid-19 vaccine at a time when many economies were wondering where to procure certified vaccines.
Post-pandemic business era Sitharaman said industry was introspecting how businesses would be done after the pandemic.
Businesses influenced by technology or those on the verge of adopting high technology, and businesses dependent on human manpower are thinking of the post-pandemic era formulation, ethic, and performance and the way in which they will carry businesses forward, she said.
The government is engaging with the industry before the budget and taking their feedback on various newer challenges they will have to face. “But of course they are ready for it. They want the government to understand how policies should be in sync with them and changing needs of time,” she said.
