'Healthcare should be fixed and should be a top priority'

By Akshay Chaturvedi, Founder and CEO, Leverage Edu

"My basic expectation lies around 3 major areas:

a. Healthcare Expenditure: I believe the FM will propose to double down on Healthcare expenditure in light of the new variants. This is much needed and essential for India, as it directly intersects with everything else we do - including higher education, as in our case at LeverageEdu. All of us, across different sectors, need to fix healthcare first and foremost, & it should of course be all of ours’ top priorities.

b. Vaccination: While it is a subset of the Healthcare fund, I believe this should be our main focus going into 2022. To get all of our people double vaccinated, & then get boosters - will be a huge win. We have done well at it so far, & should double down on distribution and awareness in the coming months. In addition, be it supporting our scientists to find better preventions to any new future variant or helping businesses who are importing world-best infrastructure here - it will be important to stand behind all of them!

c. Education Expenditure: The pandemic has changed education. The onset of online education has worked well for the minority that can afford it, but has put the larger country through an absolute unspoken crisis. While we cut out education budgets, it will be important for us to drive them in the right direction - devices for students to study from plus a distribution system that gets them these screens in real-time, or putting together well-taken-care-of sanitised schools for those who can’t benefit from online, and a lot more. It’s important we think with a broader lens and with much bigger hearts. Also, as we go along the building and supporting world-class institutions in our country, it’s important for us to play by the oldest tenet in our history - of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam - and encourage more students to become Global Citizens, to benefit from the diversity of global programs in countries that are our friends like the UK, Australia, Canada, US - in turn helping India conquer the world as a soft power.