He greeted his audience with juhaar (welcome greeting in Jharkhand), paid his respects to Birsa Munda (a tribal freedom fighter), and extended the gift of state-sponsored health insurance to Jharkhand's 25 lakh poor families.
With this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally launched Ayushman Bharat - Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojana, the world’s largest healthcare scheme across 450 districts in the country, from the dais at Ranchi’s Prabhat Tara ground.
The scheme was announced in the budget in February, and a “soft launch” was done when Modi announced it on August 15 from the Red Fort. At that time the prime minister had said that the scheme would be “formally launched” on September 25, to coincide with the birth anniversary of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, an RSS thinker and co-founder of the BJP.
However, this month, the launch date was advanced by two days to September 23. “It’s a good day today. I had time, and it is also the birthday of the legendary poet (Ramdhari Singh) Dinkar,” Modi told the audience.
At the event, officials from the Union health ministry said that the prime minister chose to launch the scheme from Jharkhand since he was wary of launching it from “any poll-bound” state. Besides, Jharkhand was also one of the “better prepared states”. The state had already empanelled 217 government hospitals, 106 private hospitals, and was planning to extend the benefit to another 32 lakh families, besides the 25 lakh families.
With that addition, Jharkhand would be covering about 80 per cent of its population, Sunil Kumar Barnwal, secretary to Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das confirmed to THE WEEK.
The formal launch event also gave Modi a chance to reaffirm his “pro-poor” credentials by not just reiterating the benefits of the Ayushman Bharat (health insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh per year, per family) but also elaborating on the other elements of the Centre’s largesse for the state.
In his speech that lasted for about 50 minutes, the prime minister also spoke about the 10 new health and wellness centres (in addition to the existing 40 in the state, and 2,500 across the country) that he inaugurated in the state on Sunday, as well as the two new medical colleges in the districts of Koderma and Chaibasa.
Currently, 31 states and union territories have joined the Ayushman Bharat scheme, and the Centre hopes that two more states would be joining by the end of this month. The magnitude of the scheme is huge. In his speech, Modi said that 13,000 hospitals had been empanelled as of now, and claimed the number of beneficiaries is roughly equivalent to the “population of the European Union, or the population of America, Canada and Mexico, taken together”.
That’s also the reason why Union health minister J.P. Nadda as well as the officials from his ministry has been reiterating that it would take time for the scheme to take off in its entirety.
“Every day, 6.5 lakh letters are being dispatched to intended beneficiaries across the country. These letters contain a gold card with the beneficiary details. All they need to do is to get a biometric done with their fingerprints, and after that the benefits will be accessible to them across the country. All this will take some time,” Nadda told THE WEEK. He also said that the scheme had an in-built security policy with 100 data controls to prevent misuse of beneficiary data.
With the launch event over, ministry officials and state implementing agencies clearly have a rather daunting task cut out for themselves.
