Budget 2024: The healthcare sector and medicine-making was not a key focus item in the budget 2024-25 but then Preetha Reddy, the executive vice chairperson at Apollo Hospitals is still happy. It is in the choice of the priority areas articulated by the finance minister, especially with respect to youth and employment, that has caught her attention. “While there is a bit of a disappointment that there was no big announcement for building the healthcare sector, it is heartening to note the emphasis on youth and on employment generation,” she says. “The distinct focus on these in the budget makes us all very happy. That, this is on top of emphasis on women empowerment and benefits for women makes it all the more seem as a move in the right direction. No other country has done this.
These coupled with measures to build the economy, makes Preetha Reddy tend towards giving the budget a 7.5 rating on 1 to 10 but then with the markets reacting negatively and the need to still get a better grip on the fine print, makes her revise the rating to 5 on 10 for the moment. Admiring the overall distance travelled and the direction of reforms, she says: “Just think about the fact that if in the first year of the five years ahead in power, if the government puts in place progressive measures for youth, skilling and on job creation and gets to leverage an untapped potential, it would prove ideal for the economy as also for the positive impact on the law and order scenario.”
On healthcare, Preetha Reddy is happy that three cancer drugs have been exempt from customs duty, there is much more that the budget could have done to build the healthcare sector. “We need lot more hospital beds. Look at what is happening to the NHS (National Health Service) – the publicly funded healthcare system of the United Kingdom. It is collapsing but it is a smaller country. We on the other hand must be moving towards both public and private sector coming together to focus more on healthcare and invest in infrastructure building in healthcare,” says Reddy.
On research also while she has welcomed the measures announced to push research and development nuclear energy and on setting up Bharat Small reactors and to promote newer technologies in this space, as also measures to aid research in agriculture. However, to Preetha Reddy, India needs all of these and more. “We should become the research hub for the rest of the world.”
There has been much hope from the industry on this budget, though Preetha Reddy, feels it will still in a sense be an interim budget as we will have another one in six months. Many seems excited by the fact that just announced Union budget, was to be unique in more ways than one. Considering that it was the seventh one in a row by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, surpassing the record of former Prime Minister Morarji Desai and more crucially, it falls on the same date, 33 years ago, when the former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, the then finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government present the landmark economic reforms budget! While it is one thing to expect policy change but as many in the industry are reacting, it is the emphasis, depth and impact of policies that will ultimately matter and for that they are getting to closely study the fineprint.
