Infographic | Union Budget 2022: All eyes on spending for healthcare — A look at health expenditure over the years

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget for 2022-2023 on February 1, a document that will be keenly eyex by every citizen after two successive years of the pandemic.

Last year the Finance Minister unveiled a Budget designed to help the country to its feet after a bruising pandemic by spending heavily on healthcare and infrastructure.

The Budget speech pegged ‘health and wellness’ expenditure at a huge Rs 2.23 lakh crore but the fine print showed that health expenditure was up less than 10 per cent to just over Rs 71,000 crore and the rest was made up by clubbing drinking water and sanitation with it, as well as Rs 35,000 crore for the Covid vaccination programme.

As India completed a year of its vaccination drive, with over 163 crore vaccine doses administered so far, on the back of a looming rise in infections in the 'third wave' triggered by Omicron, the revised estimates for healthcare and projected spends for the coming year are likely to see a rise.

Here's a look at the expenditure budget for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare over the past few years:

Last year, while the department of health received a 9 per cent jump in its allocation – Rs 71,269 crore against last year's budgetary estimate of Rs 65,012 crore – there was a big jump of around Rs 40,000 crore in the allocation of the department of drinking water which plans to provide tap water to every Indian household.

The allocations for Covid-19 vaccines, the Finance Commission grants of nearly Rs 50,000 crore for the health and drinking water departments and the allocation made for expanding the nutrition programme were included to derive such a huge number.

The budget outlay for health and wellbeing was Rs 2,23,846 crores in the budgetary estimate 2021-22 as against the preceding year’s budgetary estimate of Rs 94,452 crores, an increase of 137 per cent, Sitharaman had said while presenting the Budget, outlining the government's plan of boosting the healthcare sector as Covid-19 pandemic