Foreign Aid Amounts to Just 1.6 Pct of India's Total Health Spend

Bangalore: Health care is one of the essentials that a country must provide to its people. To provide healthcare a country needs to invest a large sum of money and in some cases avail aid from foreign giants. The international aid calculated for health could be in billions of dollars, however only a fraction of this amount is received by most recipient country governments which is spent on healthcare of their people. Like in the case of $775 million received by India as Development Assistance in Health (DAH) in 2010, it was only estimated to 1.6 percent of the total amount spent by both centre and state governments on public health that year, as reported by Rema Nagarajan for TNN.

As per the chart of countries receiving largest aid, India received the highest amount as DAH in absolute terms, which is just a fraction of the amount out of the capital spent by government estimated at 32 percent and the remaining 68 percent is drawn out of people's pockets for healthcare in the country. So out of the total health expenditure in India just 1.6 percent came from foreign aid in 2010. When the per capita terms were estimated in the foreign aid India recorded the lowest among the other recipient countries, just 63 cents per person annually.

The total global DAH in 2010 was $ 28.2 billion, while the government's expenditure for health by the countries receiving the DAH was more than 18 folds higher at $521 billion. As a result the international aid received by the governments of recipient countries was just 5.4 percent of the total spending of these countries.

Also Read: Teens Prefer Text Messages for Health Tips