Social Accessibility of Healthcare in India: A Policy based Study of Pre and Post-Independence Era Dr Sanjay Kumar

The accessibility of affordable and equal healthcare has always been a critical and significant issue in view of the low paying capacity of a large proportion of the population in India. As the role of the private sector healthcare providers is becoming more widespread (particularly in the past two-three decades), healthcare services are getting out of reach of the poor and marginalized sections of the population. There is an added emphasis on insurance-based healthcare system in the recent years. This system further deprives a large section of the poor from accessing healthcare facilities due to their inability to pay insurance premiums on time.After economic reform in India, a high degree of income differentiation has led to a rise in lifestyle diseases for the rich and under-nutrition and other communicable diseases for the poor. There are wide inequities in accessibility of healthcare services among the various sub-groups of society on the basis of class, caste, religion, region, gender, etc. The Scheduled castes and Scheduled tribes (SCs and STs) sub-groups have less access to private health services and are consequently more dependent on the public health sector, while public health sector become totally insufficient to treat majority of the people. According to studies More than 35 percent of the Indian population suffers from serious diseases or illnesses which have an adverse impact on the quality of life. India constitutes nearly 16.5 percent of the world’s population but has a share of 20 percent of the world’s diseases (.[62] The policy analysis is an established research and academic discipline in the industrialized and developed countries. But in developing countries like India, its application is still limited, particularly in the healthcare sector. On the behalf of public health policies many studies are arguing that health of the common people has never been a priority in Indian society as in many other places in the world. This can be highlighted through the fact that it is largely invisible in the domestic debates till now.