Government to provide more funds for Ayushman Bharat next year: Piyush Goyal

Finance Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday, February 8 said the government may provide more funds for the world's biggest health care scheme -- Ayushman Bharat -- next year.

In the last four months of its launch, the scheme has already benefited over 10 lakh people, he said while speaking at the sixth Global Fund Replenishment organised by Ministry of Health.

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"The government has already provided half a billion dollar funding for the program. We expect to provide much more funds in the next year," he said.

The interim Budget presented last week has raised the allocation for Ayushman Bharat scheme to Rs 6,400 crore for 2019-2020.

"Unless we create a distress-free health care system for 1.3 billion people in India, unless we look at health in a very holistic fashion right from preventive health care...we will not be able to take people out of distress that health care can cause particularly to lesser privileged," he said.

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Improvement of the infrastructure of health care also opens up huge opportunities for companies around the world to participate in an effort to expand the health care system, he said. The scheme aims to provide free health care to 50 crore people encompassing different dimension of family health care needs.

Referring to energy access to every household, the Finance Minister said, electricity will reach to every home by April of this year, a decade ahead of sustainable development goal.