The Health Ministry had sought increased budgetary allocations for the eleventh Five Year Plan, Union health and Family Welfare Minister, Dr Anbumani Ramadoss said on Saturday.
CHENNAI: With the aim of increasing spending on public health, the Health Ministry had sought increased budgetary allocations for the eleventh Five Year Plan, Union health and Family Welfare Minister, Dr Anbumani Ramadoss said on Saturday.
"We are confident that we will be allocated a sum of about Rs 1.36 lakh crore, as against the Rs 45,000 crore in the Tenth Five Year Plan," he told reporters on the sidelines of a Strabismology conference, 'Synergy 07'.
An amount of Rs 1,500 crore would be earmarked for the National Blindness Control Programme under the Plan, he said.
Asked about the forthcoming health programmes, he said that the Centre would introduce the National School Health Programme, where each school-going child would be provided with a 'smart card.'
"The child will be screened annually for various health problems relating to vision, hearing, heart, diabetes and aneamia among others, the information of which will be updated in the smartcard," he said, adding that further modalities were being worked out with the Human Resources Ministry.
"This programme will be a Public-Private Partnership model," Ramadoss said.
The Centre last year had trained two lakh teachers in the country on identifying eye-defects in children, he said.
On the controversial Compulsory Rural Postings scheme for medicos, Ramadoss reiterated that any decision would be taken only after the Dr Sambasiva Rao Committee, which is taking the opinions of stakeholders, submitted its report.
The committee is expected to submit the report by the end of December.
Earlier, in his address at the conference, Ramadoss said that India would achieve the targetted .3 per cent prevalence of blindness by the year 2015.
"When the National Blindness Control Programme was started some 20 years back, the prevalence rate was 1.4 per cent, which has now come down to 1 per cent," he said.
Citing trends on the squint-eye problem, the theme of the conference, Ramadoss described as a 'large percentage,' the two per cent prevalence rate.
"The Government is taking this issue seriously and will help the private sector in its initiatives in creating public awareness on the problem," he said.
He also called for active participation by the private sector in the Government's health-related initiatives, 'as 20 per cent of work in the health sector is done by them.'
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