Govt should prioritise to move GDP from 1.2pc to 2.5pc in healthcare: Rajesh Jain, MD of Panacea Biotech

By Shalini Bhardwaj
New Delhi [India], January 31 : Ahead of the presentation of the Union budget 2022-23 on February 1 by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the healthcare industry has urged for the improvement of investments and incentivizing of capital expenditure of healthcare sector.
In an exclusive interview to ANI, Rajesh Jain, Panacea Biotech MD, CII & Chairman, National Committee on Biotechnology said, "CII has a pretty strong focus on investments and incentivizing capital expenditure in healthcare. We all know that healthcare expenditure today is around 1.2 per cent annually, if you just leave the last year aside, where the majority of the expense was done to prevent COVID-19 infections. The Government did a good job, no doubt about it."
He further said, "I believe we need to increase this healthcare expenditure from 1.2 per cent to almost 2.5 per cent every year, in a phased manner programme, and this expenditure should be invested to create and modernize our public healthcare infrastructure, upgrade and optimize efficiencies of the primary health care centres."
"Upskilling in health, as well as further rebuilding on digital health should be of a priority as part of this expenditure of 2.5 per cent of the GDP and declare health care as a national priority and incentivize creating the capacity and infrastructure to a comprehensive set of measures. For example, capital subsidy on how 25 to 30 per cent of the total project cost can be provided, especially in priority geographies, to improve the healthcare infrastructure, especially in tier 2 or tier 3 cities."
According to Rajesh Jain, meeting vaccine demand is another target of pharma companies that are producing COVID-19 vaccines in 2022. Rajesh Jain said, "Biotechnology industry, in general, has been looking at research incentives to help the private sector research and the private sector vaccine industry in the last few years came forward of course, along with the academia, from India, to bring COVID-19 vaccine, as a tool to fight this pandemic, and very successfully not only in India but across the developing countries as part of the vaccine Maitri, we saw the Indian COVID-19 vaccine crossing the borders and helping other countries."
He said that the Biotechnology industry is also looking for research in the vaccine area. "Biotechnology industry is now looking for research in the vaccine area to help the private sector with incentive schemes that the government sector also enjoys. It will help us in vaccine production and help each other within the healthcare continuum. We are right now researching innovative products which are challenging but taking that research to the clinics is another part of the challenge. Currently, tax authorities do not count the expenditure done on outhouse clinical trials as part of the investments and this has been our work for the last several years that all clinical trials done outside the company should also be part of the VAT tax reduction scheme that we have and this will increase to almost 200 per cent from the current plans."