Medical education budget scaled down in Yogi’s UP

Shahira Naim

The medical education budget has been scaled down from Rs 4,577.66 crore in 2016-17 to Rs 3,902.16 in 2017-18 in the very first year of the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh.

The state government has, however, claimed the budget for buying medicines etc. at medical colleges remains unchanged at Rs 63.27 crore even this year. It has also claimed that the budget for buying equipment and supplies for these colleges also remained constant at Rs 10.48 crore for both fiscals.

Dividing the medical education budget in revenue and capital expenditure, the government claims that in the 2017-18 Budget, the revenue expenditure has increased from Rs 2,066.16 in 2016-17 to Rs 2,560.19 in the current financial year— up Rs 494 crore.

What it fails to add is that this enhanced Budget will largely go towards paying increased salaries and pensions under the Seventh Pay Commission.

The capital expenditure — important for building assets and reflecting long-term growth — has plunged from Rs 2,511.50 crore in 2016-17 to Rs 1,341.97 crore this fiscal.

The result: Gorakhpur’s Baba Ram Das Medical College, which received Rs 15.9 crore in 2016-17, will get only Rs 7.8 crore this year.

Similarly, the budget allocation for the state-run Ganesh Shankar Vidhyarthi Memorial Medical College, Kanpur, and Motilal Nehru Medical College, Allahabad, has also come down from Rs 15.9 crore each in 2016-17 to Rs 3.3 crore and Rs 4.2 crore, respectively, this year.

A faculty member of King George Medical College, Lucknow, said with input costs going up, the slashing of medical education budget would have a direct bearing on the quality of education.

State Minister for Health Sidhartha Nath Singh had admitted in the Vidhan Parishad that 18,382 posts of doctors had been created in the state of which 11,034 had been filled and that there was a shortage of 7,348 doctors.

According to a 2016 World Health Organisation study in Uttar Pradesh, doctors account for more than half of all health workers. Clearly, the number of other health workers was not enough.

Most of the 30 districts across the nation that rank lowest in terms of density of nurses are in UP. The state has a 50 per cent shortfall of nursing staff at primary health centres (PHCs) and community health centres (CHCs).

According to the Rural Health Statistics-2016, the CHCs are 84 per cent short of specialists. Taken together, the PHCs and CHCs have just half of the required the staff strength. Although all PHCs technically have doctors, one in three PHCs does not have a lab technician.

In this context, the reduction in medical education budget exposes the BJP government’s election rhetoric on the subject.