A large part of the Indian population today has little or no access to good quality healthcare at affordable prices. The public health system is in jeopardy, due to decades of appallingly low public investments; inadequate and antiquated infrastructure; severe shortage of human resources; and inadequacies in government policies.

The Road to Universal Health Coverage, released by Dr Rajiv Lall, executive chairman, IDFC in New Delhi recently touches upon the various issues Indian Healthcare system suffers from along with suggestions for improvement. Report which is the outcome of a collaborative effort led by the IDFC Foundation provides a forum for free, frank and open exchange of views necessary to arrive at innovative and workable solutions across various infrastructure sectors that would find acceptance among various stakeholders.

Twelfth in the series, since 2001, the India Infrastructure Report 2013-14 brings together a range of insightful perceptions of academics, researchers and practitioners committed to improving healthcare practices.

The report also discusses that failed public health systems have forced people to turn to the private sector, which is costly and unregulated, with services often being provided by unqualified medical practitioners. As a result, people seeking healthcare services have the agonising choice between poor quality public facilities and costly, yet undependable private services. Preventive and primary healthcare have been marginalised, with the focus having shifted to curative tertiary care, higher importance of clinical medicine, and extremely high dependence on clinical investigations. Health expenditures can be prohibitively high with the rural population and the urban poor being the worst sufferers.

India is thus faced with the daunting challenge of providing Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and ensuring that all people receive good quality healthcare without facing significant financial difficulty. India Infrastructure Report 2013-14 looks at the challenges for ensuring availability, accessibility, affordability and quality of comprehensive healthcare to all, and explores strategies to overcome the impediments along the road to UHC.

In this process, it also discusses whether initiatives taken to reduce the burden of people’s health expenditure has yielded desirable results, how to leverage the strengths of the private sector in healthcare delivery, role played by the non-state entities in rural healthcare, imperatives of engaging with the community and the high impact of preventive care at low cost. The Report draws the readers’attention to some of the emerging issues in the health sector such as rising burden of non-communicable diseases and mental health, human resource crisis in health sector and health concerns of informal sector workers, and steps required to attend to them within the UHC framework.

IDFC Limited (formerly Infrastructure Development Finance Company Limited) was incorporated in 1997 as India’s first specialised infrastructure-financing intermediary in order to address the growing requirements of the various infrastructure sectors. IDFC’s mandate was to lead private capital flows to commercially viable infrastructure projects. Having successfully played its role in promoting private investment in infrastructure over the last 16 years, IDFC would now enlarge its footprint in the financial services sector after receiving ‘in-principle’ approval of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to set up universal banking operations.