Will Modi Government's Flagship Health Insurance Scheme Be Able To Deliver?

As India goes to polls, the Modi government’s flagship health insurance scheme can be a game changer in some key states. Will it be able to deliver?

- Joe C. Mathew

To the casual eye, nothing could be sweeter than Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s letter to 75 million households in seven different languages in the last four months. The attempt was to reach out to the underprivileged — some 100 million families or about 500 million Indians who are included in the Socio-economic and Caste Census list of 2011 — and tell them about the Ì€ 5 lakh worth of medical treatment each of these families is entitled to every year through the Centre’s new flagship health insurance scheme: “Prime Minister Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) – Ayushman Bharat”. The letter also reminded them about other big social welfare measures initiated (or re-branded) by the current government to improve the living conditions of India’s poor and how the prime minister, with his personal experience of poverty, could help craft schemes to ensure ease of living for the least privileged.

Modi’s letters are driving enrolment to this scheme in many parts of the country. For most North and North Eastern states which have never had similar state-run health insurance schemes (unlike several South Indian states), the scheme is expected to be a game changer. Every day, Indu Bhushan, the head of the National Health Agency (NHA), which implements the PM-JAY, updates the number of enrolments through his tweets — “4.22 lakh beneficiary e-cards generated, bringing the total e-cards to 1.36 crore”, he wrote on February 8.