“One has to be alive to be a patriot,” former Indian health secretary K Sujatha Rao wrote on Twitter on May 13, referring to election debates that focused on issues of “nationalism and terror and not health”.
India has high levels of premature deaths & more die of diabetes, suicides, infectious diseases & NCD's than terrorism. Yet, election debates r more abt nationalism & terror & not health. 1 needs 2 be alive 2 be a patriot. Hlth & edu need to be top & least 8% GDP allocated 2 them
May 13, 2019The data backs Rao's assertion of misplaced priorities.
In 2017, terrorism claimed the lives of 766 Indians, or 0.007 percent of all deaths, while health reasons claimed 6.6 million Indians, or 90 percent of all deaths.
In 2017, the last year for which comparable data are available, India's spending on defence was double its health expenditure, according to the 2017-18 budget.
Poor investment in health and education directly impacts the country's productivity and economic growth. Indians work for six-and-a-half years at peak productivity, compared to 20 years in China, 16 in Brazil and 13 in Sri Lanka, ranking 158th out of 195 countries in an international ranking of human capital, as IndiaSpend reported in September 2018.
8,000 Times More Deaths From Ill-Health Than Terror
There were 9.9 million deaths in India in 2017, with a death rate of 717.79 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the 2018 Global Burden of Disease, a global estimate of morbidity and mortality published by the University of Washington.
Communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritious diseases caused 26.6 percent of all deaths in India, and non-communicable diseases caused 63.4 percent of all deaths, while injuries accounted for 9.8 percent.
Deaths by conflict and terrorism fall under the “interpersonal violence” category, accounting for 0.007 percent of all deaths, or 766, according to GBD data.
Terrorism claimed fewer lives, according to another database: there were 178 terror incidents reported nationwide in 2017, killing 77 and injuring 295, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal.
Deaths due to diabetes (254,500), suicides (210,800), infectious diseases (2 million) and non-communicable diseases (6.2 million) put together are 8,000 times the deaths caused by terrorism (766).
Defence Vs Health Vs Education Spending
“... Hlth [Health] & edu [education] need to be top (sic) & [at] least 8 percent GDP allocated 2 [to] them,” Rao wrote in her tweet.
India's public health spending is among the world's lowest. With a fifth of the world's population, India's public expenditure was 1.02 percent of gross domestic product in 2015, IndiaSpend reported in June 2018.
While India's public-health spending was estimated to be 1.4 percent of GDP in 2017-18, the equivalent proportion of GDP spent on health in the Maldives is 9.4 percent, in Sri Lanka 1.6 percent, in Bhutan 2.5 percent and in Thailand 2.9 percent.
India is the fifth largest defence spender in the world. The defence budget in 2017-18 was Rs 4.31 lakh crore ($ 72.1 billion, using 2017 rates), or 2.5 percent of GDP, as per Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, a think-tank. This is double the health budget that year, according to our analysis.
About a fourth of the defence budget, or 24 percent, goes towards pensions.
In 2017, India's school education budget, including central and state spending, was about Rs 4.41 lakh crore ($ 73.8 billion) or 2.6 percent of GDP, more than defence and health separately. However, almost half of India's grade V students cannot read a grade II text and more than 70 percent cannot carry out division, according to the Annual Status of Education Report 2018, IndiaSpend reported in January 2019.
India had the second-lowest score for quality of education in South Asia in 2016 (66 out of a possible 100, just ahead of Afghanistan's 64) and behind group leader Sri Lanka (75), IndiaSpend reported on Sept. 25, 2018.
Health And Education Need More Money
While India's health budget is rising--in 2018 it was double of what it was in 2010--as IndiaSpend reported in January 2019, it is still inadequate, considering that India is home to a third of the world's stunted children, has the highest number of tuberculosis patients and reports among the world's highest out-of-pocket expenditure, an indicator of public healthcare failures.
The National Health Policy of 2017 talked about increasing public-health spending to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2025, but India has not yet met the 2010 target of 2 percent of GDP, IndiaSpend reported in April 2017.
The National Policy on Education, which guides India's approach to education, has since 1968 recommended a minimum spending of 6 percent GDP on education but that target has never been met. There have been “pervasive and persistent failures in implementation leading to sub-optimal utilisation of the resources provided”, the 2016 document said.
(Yadavar is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)This copy was published in a special arrangement with IndiaSpend.
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