The Central government released a Draft National Health Policy in January 2015 to address the urgent need to improve the performance of the current weak healthcare systems prevailing in the country. The whole system suffers from serious inequities and regional imbalances in health sector mainly because of the inefficient primary health care network run by the state governments. Primary Health Centres (PHCs) is the basic health infrastructure set up by the state governments as per the direction of the Centre to provide health care delivery for the masses. These PHCs have failed miserably to provide the basic health services and medicines to the vast majority of the poor people in most states ever since they have been established. The draft policy acknowledges this fact that the prevailing health delivery mechanism failed to realise the wide gaps which exist in the country with regard to providing basic healthcare to the population. The main reason for such a failure is a steady decline in public health expenditure in each state as compared to the proclaimed overall health expenditure in the country. Meanwhile the healthcare needs in India underwent a massive change due to a variety of factors such as an increase in life expectancy and consequent increase in ageing population, emergence of new diseases and spread of non communicable ailments such as diseases of the heart and central nervous systems, diabetes, cancer, respiratory, musculoskeletal and gastrointestinal disorders, etc.
Achievement of an acceptable, affordable and sustainable standard of good health and an appropriate health system to reduce disease burden is, therefore, stated to be the main thrust of the new policy. Although the Health Policy Documents of 2002 and the current policy draft of January 2015 do spell out issues as well as methodology to address them, the major factor responsible for the non-performance of the healthcare policy has been the poor implementation of the various programmes. Dual responsibility for healthcare programme implementation by the Centre and the States as mandated under the Indian Constitution has been a limiting factor in policy implementation. The very low level spending on healthcare at 1.5 per cent of GDP is perhaps the crux of poor health of the Indian population. The number of medical and para medical professionals and the number of beds per thousand population in India are thus among the lowest, probably higher than only Bhutan and Sub Saharan Africa, but lower than in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. These critical matters have not been addressed in the new draft health policy. The draft takes note of some of the neglected areas such as women's health, infant mortality, necessity to initiate research on public health, regulation of medical research and developing ethical criteria for health professionals but no programmes have been mooted. Integration of Indian systems of medicines to the health infrastructure of the country is another critical area not adequately addressed by the draft. Considering all these deficiencies in the current draft, a thorough review and redrafting of the policy statement in consultation with all the stakeholders is called for.