NEW DELHI: Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu exhorted all stakeholders to come forward for boosting manufacture of medical equipment and devices in the country in order to bringing down production cost.“We have a paradoxical situation when it comes to health sector.
On the one hand, India is making rapid strides in medical tourism with the people from other countries coming to our country for a range of treatments -- from liver transplant to knee replacement. However, the same treatment is out of reach for many Indians,” Naidu said in his address to the 46th annual convocation of AIIMS on Friday.
“We need to overcome this paradoxical situation by ensuring that treatment is affordable for all Indians.”
To overcome this paradoxical situation in the health sector, Naidu asserted that medical equipment, including the state-of-the-art ones, need to be made indigenously made in the country itself. In this regard, the vice-president spoke about the impetus which the Centre’s Make in India programme could do to this sector. “Such a move will not only save precious foreign exchange, but also bring down the costs of manufacturing.”
Naidu drew the attention of the gathering to how out-of-pocket expenditure for medical purposes was a huge burden to the society, especially the poor. For alleviating this burden, Naidu said, the Centre launched ‘Ayushman Bharat Yojana’ to cover more than 10 crore vulnerable families by providing a coverage of up to `5 lakh per family per year.