Economic Survey 2024: Govt bats for sound healthcare, mental health systems for a resilient economy

Economic Survey 2024: The government that released the report on the state of the economy ahead of the Union Budget 2024 on Tuesday, emphasised on the importance of the healthcare sector for a resilient economy. 

“A sound healthcare system is interconnected with long-term factors responsible for inclusive growth, such as ensuring the quality of human capital and labour productivity, higher household savings, avoiding the poverty trap due to catastrophic health expenditure, and building the capability to withstand any health shocks such as COVID-19. In that spirit, the Indian health system has been consistently revamped,” it said, adding that the government is ensuring sound health and wellbeing of individuals across all ages through a preventive and promotive healthcare orientation in the developmental policies and universal access to good healthcare services. 

Under the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY), launched in 2018 that gives Rs 5 lakh per year healthcare cover for underprivileged families for secondary and tertiary hospitalisation, 34.73 crore Ayushman Bharat cards have been generated. It said 7.37 crore hospital admissions have been covered by the scheme, with 49 per cent of the beneficiaries being women as of July 8, 2024. 

The 10,000th Jan Aushadhi Kendra was inaugurated in AIIMS Deoghar, under the PM Jan Aushadhi Kendras programme that offers quality medicines at rates that are 50-90 per cent cheaper than market price. More than 300 Amrit pharmacies, that offer subsidised medicines for critical illnesses, are operating in different states and UTs. 

Under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) launched in 2021 that aims to create a national digital health ecosystem, 64.86 crore Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts (ABHA) have been created, 3.06 lakh health facility have been registered, and 39.77 crore health records have been linked with ABHA. 

The survey stated that 26.62 crore patients have been served across 128 specialities at 1.25 lakh health and wellness centres through 15,857 hubs under the eSanjeevani programme launched in 2019 that offer telemedicine through virtual doctor consultations in remote areas. 

MENTAL HEALTH

“Sound mental health of children and adolescents is the foundation of their holistic development and a critical step towards ensuring quality economic growth. This assumes urgency in the wake of rising prevalence of mental health issues in youth, attributable to academic pressures, social media, family dynamics, and socio-economic environment,” the survey stated. 

Quoting NCERT’s ‘Mental Health and Well-being of School Students Survey’, the survey stated that there has been an increase in the prevalence of “poor mental health among adolescents, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic”. 

“The increase in mental health issues in children and adolescents is often linked to the overuse of the internet and, specifically, social media. Unrestrained and unsupervised use of the internet by children can culminate into a range of problems, from the more prevalent obsessive consumption of social media or “doom scrolling” to severe ones such as cyberbullying,” the Economic Survey 2024 stated. 

It quoted Jonathan Haidt, American social psychologist and author’s book ‘The Anxious Generation: How the great rewiring of children is causing an epidemic of mental illness’ that stated that the “epidemic of mental health issues hit the world in the early 2010s with the advent of mobile phones”.

Mental health issues impact a person’s quality of life and constrain the realisation of an individual’s potential, it said. “At an aggregate economic level, mental health disorders are associated with significant productivity losses due to absenteeism, decreased productivity, disability, increased healthcare costs, etc,” it said. Poverty also leads to mental health issues due to the “stressful living conditions, financial instability, and a lack of opportunities for upward mobility” that can lead to psychological distress.

Over 22 mental health disorders are covered under Ayushman Bharat, the survey added.

The government aims to increase the number of psychiatrists, from 0.75 psychiatrists per lakh population in 2021 to 3 per lakh population, as per the WHO norm. The government is nurturing peer support networks, self-help groups, and community-based rehabilitation programmes, partnering with NGOs to scale up efforts, share knowledge, and leverage resources to enhance future policies, sensitising mental health at the preschool, integrating mental health interventions in schools etc. 

“However, the fundamental issue of the lack of awareness about mental health and the stigma surrounding it can render any sincerely crafted programme unfeasible. Hence, there is a need to bring about a paradigm shift and utilise a bottom-up, whole-of-community approach in addressing the topic of mental health. Breaking the stigma starts with taking cognisance of the natural human tendency to accept physical ailments and seeking treatment for the same while being in denial about mental health issues,” it said. 

“Over the past few years, healthcare has become more affordable and accessible for the general public, as noted by the National Health Accounts (NHA) estimates,” the survey stated. Health expenditure has tilted towards primary healthcare, stated the survey.