20 May, 2017
The study points that despite the country's socio-economic development, India has failed to achieve in healthcare goals and the gap between the score and predicted score has widened in the last 25 years.
Despite some improvement, India continues to be one of the poor performers in healthcare, ranking at 154 far behind China, and lower than Sri Lanka or even Bangladesh - in terms of quality and accessibility of healthcare, according to the latest Global Burden of Disease study.
As per the report, India's health care index has seen an increase of 14.1 in last 25 years, going up from 30.7 in 1990 to 44.8 in 2015, but the numbers are much lesser than Sri Lanka (72.8), Bangladesh (51.7), Bhutan (52.7) and Nepal (50.8).
In particular, mortality rates from 32 diseases which should not be fatal in presence of effective medical care had been looked at.
China is far ahead of India ranking at 82 with a score of 74 on the index.
The lack of access to and quality in healthcare is a damning indictment on successive governments in India, and something that should not have happened because the country is the world's go-to destination when it comes to cheap generic medicines. However, India ranked above Pakistan (43).
India's score on the healthcare index may have improved, but we are still lagging behind in the control and management of diseases like tuberculosis, diabetes, rheumatic heart diseases and chronic kidney disease. However, the report shows that the country performed worse than expected in tuberculosis, diabetes, rheumatic heart diseases and chronic kidney diseases. This reports also targets the growing inequality between countries, said an Indian Express report.
"If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73•8 in 2015", the report says.
