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While there has been a consistent decline in ‘out-of-pocket’ expenditure, as a share of the total health expenditure, the government’s share has steadily increased, according to the National Health Accounts Estimates 2019-20 released.
According to the data, the government health expenditure, as a share of the total health expenditure, increased from 29 per cent in 2014-15 to 41.4 per cent in 2019-20.
On the other hand, the ‘out-of-pocket’ share fell from 62.6 per cent in 2014-15 to 47.1 per cent in 2019-20; it was 48.2 per cent in 2018-19, 48.8 per cent in 2017-18.
Overall, the government health expenditure increased from 1.13 per cent of the GDP in 2014-15 to 1.35 per cent in 2019-20. The government plans to increase this to 2.5 per cent of the GDP by 2025.
Asked if the government could achieve this target, NITI Aayog member (Health) Dr VK Paul said: “The trend is clear. There is an increase in healthcare spending by the government, both by the Centre and state governments.”
The per capita spending on healthcare increased from Rs 1,108 in 2014-15 to Rs 2,014 in 2019-20. It has almost doubled.
Highlighting the other important findings, Bhushan said: “A majority of the government spend is concentrated on the primary care centres — investment in the primary sector increased from 51 per cent of the total government spend on health in 2014-15 to 56 per cent in 2019-20. Expenditure on social security schemes has increased from 5.7 per cent to 9.3 per cent in this period.
According to the report, 55.9 per cent of the government’s total health spend for 2019-20 went to primary care, 29.6 per cent to secondary care, and 6.4 per cent to tertiary care.
Editorial
The partisan council (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
April 24 marked the 50th anniversary of the Kesavananda Bharati judgment and it was indeed ironic to read the Bar Council of India’s (BCI’s) resolution questioning the Supreme Court’s (SC’s) legitimacy to decide a batch of petitions seeking equal rights and liberties for non-heterosexual couples.
Surprisingly, the BCI’s resolution employs a near-identical phrase to the one the Union law minister recently used to question the SC’s power of judicial review in the context of the collegium system that is intended to ensure a fair and independent judiciary, free from political interference.
The Union law minister, and now the BCI, assert that the “will of the people” predominantly resides with Parliament, not with unelected judges.
It must be noted at the outset that not every democracy in the world has the “first-past-the-post” system that India provides for. Several democracies provide for proportionate representation in Parliament, reflecting the views of political parties in proportion to the number of MPs elected, and provide for a mechanism to recall MPs when the electorate loses faith in them.
Indian law, however, has no such provisions. In fact, far from reflecting the “will of the people”, elected representatives often defect (either individually or collectively) in pursuit of political power. One is left to wonder as to what happens then to the “will of the people” who elected them as members of a particular party.
Ideas Page
India and SCO paradox (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 2, International Relations)
The visit of Chinese and Russian defence ministers to attend a ministerial meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation this week in Delhi is drawing much attention.
India, which is chairing the Eurasian regional forum this year, will have a range of bilateral problems to discuss with its fellow SCO members.
These include the disengagement and de-escalation of the border confrontation with China and Moscow’s supply of spares to the large inventory of Russian arms amidst the war in Ukraine.
That takes us to the SCO paradox: Even as the Eurasian forum looks attractive to a growing number of regional states, its internal contradictions are casting a shadow over its strategic coherence.
If the main objective of the SCO was to promote peace in Eurasia, its ability to cope with the intra-state and inter-state conflicts among the member states is now under scrutiny.
To make matters more complicated, Russia’s war in Ukraine is raising questions about Moscow’s capacity to sustain primacy in its backyard. Meanwhile, China’s rise is increasing the prospects for Beijing’s emergence as the dominant force in inner Asia.
Explained
Quantum computers and India (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper3, Science and Technology)
“Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem because it doesn’t look so easy,” remarked Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a cult status, at a lecture at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1982.
This lecture — later published as a paper under the title ‘Simulating Physics with Computers’ — in which Feynman proposed the development of different, more powerful computers by utilising the quantum mechanical properties of matter, is often considered the original idea behind quantum computers.
Four decades later, quantum computers have become a reality, though they are yet to do anything meaningful. Getting quantum computers to realise their full potential and perform tasks impossible or impractical for the conventional computers is one of the hottest areas of research.
Last week, India decided to join in this global effort in a big way, by setting up a Rs 6,000 crore National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications. Development of homegrown quantum computers is one of the major objectives of the mission.
Quantum computers are not just the next generation of faster and more efficient computers. Conventional computers, when they are more powerful and have much higher capabilities, become supercomputers.
But these perform their tasks in the same way as the normal home computers or mobile phones do. Quantum computers are fundamentally different in the way they handle and process information.
They are meant to be useful in some very specific situations where the traditional ways of computing are inadequate. For more mundane uses, like playing a video or browsing the internet, quantum computers would not offer any significant advantage over conventional computers.
Zero Shadow Day (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 1, Geography)
Bengaluru experienced a ‘Zero Shadow Day’, when vertical objects appear to cast no shadow. This was because the sun was at its zenith, and so the shadow was directly under the object.
On April 25, 2023, the Sun reaches exactly overhead at (12:17 pm) in Bengaluru and at all places along the 130 north Latitude. The shadow of any vertical object would disappear at that instant. Zero Shadow Day occurs on different days in places away from 130 latitude,” the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium said in a release ahead of the phenomenon.
For every point on Earth between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, there are two Zero Shadow Days a year.
For Bengaluru, the next one is on August 18. The Zero Shadow Day is restricted to locations between the tropics, and so places north of Ranchi in India are out of it.
“One falls during the Uttarayan when the Sun moves northwards, and the other is during Dakshinayan when the Sun moves southwards,” Niruj Ramanujam, member of the public outreach and education committee of the Astronomical Society of India (ASI), had told The Indian Express in 2018.
Uttarayan (movement of the Sun from south to north from winter solstice to summer solstice) and Dakshinayan (back from north to south) happen because Earth’s rotation axis is tilted at an angle of roughly 23.5° to the axis of revolution around the Sun.
India’s first ‘water metro: green, clean boats to feed Kochi's metro rail (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday (April 25) inaugurated the first phase of the Kochi Water Metro — a first of its kind public boat service in India integrated with a metro rail network.
The Kochi Water Metro is a project being implemented by Kochi Metro Rail Corporation Limited (KMRL) with the assistance of a German funding agency, Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau.
It includes boats that are hybrid, battery-powered, air-conditioned and disabled-friendly among other features. The water metro will operate on water bodies like any other ferry or traditional boat service, but with modern facilities, enhanced safety and security measures.
Kochi Water metro has been envisaged as a feeder service of the Kochi metro rail, which has been operational since 2017. While boats have been designed as coaches of Kochi Metro, boat terminals, passenger entry and exit gates, ticket counters and safety measures mirror the features of the metro rail service.