%0 Journal Article
%T Budgetary Expenditure on Health and Human Development in India
%A Brijesh C. Purohit
%J International Journal of Population Research
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/914808
%X This study aims at analyzing the differentials across rich and poor states and across rich and poorer strata and rural urban segments of 19 major Indian states. The study indicates that besides individual health financing policies of the respective state governments, there are significant disparities even between rural and urban strata and rich and poorer sections of the society. These are indicated by high inequality coefficients and an emerging pattern of life style second generation health problems as well as levels of utilization of both preventive and curative care both in public and private sectors. Our results emphasise that there is a need to increase public expenditure on health, improve efficiency in utilization of existing public facilities, and popularize government run health insurance schemes meant primarily for the poor. These steps may help to mitigate partly the inequitable outcomes. 1. Introduction There has been a general concern for disparity across rural and urban areas particularly pertaining to human development. This is despite the persistent policies of investing more in rural health infrastructure and an orientation of health policies which remain rural focused in India. It is pertinent to explore the issue that why this outcome of adverse indicators of human development for rural areas has emerged as a prominent outcome of planned effort and to suggest remedy for this disparity. The objective of this paper is to analyse this disparity in terms of human development and health outcomes across major Indian states with a view to suggest suitable policy modifications to overcome the disparity between rural and urban areas in regard to these aspects. Unlike other studies our focus is to link the health and human development aspects using information from household level surveys. Instead of analyzing state level differentials alone the study contributes in understanding the causes of this disparity between rural and urban areas both in poorer and richer states of India and suggests policy imperatives to overcome this outcome. 2. Methodology In this paper we compare human development and health outcomes across major Indian states. First we explain here the basic framework for our analysis and data base. Our focus in this paper is more on health and human development perspective1. To develop empirically testable hypotheses, a model of the demand for health defined in terms of different indicators of mortality and diseases is specified. Since life expectancy at birth is an important component of human development and it depends
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijpr/2012/914808/