VIJAYAWADA: The State government has allocated Rs 13,830.44 crore in the budget for health, medical and family welfare, 21.11 per cent higher than in 2020-21. The higher allocation is intended to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 3 of the UN, i.e. ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all.
Presenting the budget, Finance Minister Buggana Rajendranath Reddy said the government has spent Rs 2,246.18 crore on multiple interventions for prevention, mitigation and management of the Covid-19 pandemic so far.
“This expenditure has been incurred on labs, testing, procurement of vaccines, medicines, PPEs, ventilators, TrueNat machine chips, installation of oxygen pipelines etc,” he explained. In the budget, Rs 500 crore each has been earmarked for Covid containment and vaccines, inviting criticism from the opposition TDP that it is too little.
In all, 53.34 lakh people have been administered the first dose of vaccine and 21.74 lakh have received the second dose as of May 16. It will not be out of the way to state that the NITI Aayog has lauded the mitigation and management strategies of Andhra Pradesh and also the various innovations adopted by it in the fight against Covid, he pointed out.
Despite the constraints, the government has increased allocations for all the main heads. For instance, it has hiked allocation for medical and health to Rs 13,830 crore including capital expenditure of Rs 2,464 crore from Rs 9,426 crore last fiscal. Interesting point is last time, the capital expenditure under this head was just Rs 589 crore. Given the Covid pandemic, and the increasing need for infrastructure in hospitals, the question is whether this is enough.
For general education too, the allocation has been hiked to almost Rs 27,000 crore up from around Rs 24,000 crore last fiscal. Capital expenditure on this count is up from Rs 3,500 crore to Rs 4,192 crore. For irrigation and flood control, the capital expenditure has been increased to Rs 11,593 crore from the actual capital expenditure of Rs 3,862 crore last fiscal.
The Finance Minister began his budget speech eloquently, quoting Elisabeth Kubler-Ross that “the most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, suffering, loss and have found their way out of the depths” and laced his speech with another stirring quote that “life is no life when honours left, man is a man when honours kept.” He fittingly ended his speech too with a quote from Swami Vivekananda — “We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate.”
In other words, the government, he indicated, is firm on carrying forward the welfare agenda, come hell or high water. The principal opposition TDP boycotted the one-day session in protest against the alleged “misrule” of the YSRC government. Hence, the budget was passed without much discussion. Earlier, Governor Biswa Bhushan Harichandan addressed both the Houses virtually.