Monitoring and Evaluating Progress towards Universal Health Coverage in India

While Universal health coverage (UHC)is not new to India, it was only in 2011 that the government appointed a high level expert group to develop a strategy to achieve UHC. Many of the recommendations of this report have been incorporated into the country’s 12th five year plan (2012 to 2017). Unfortunately, currently, it is not clear where India is on the road towards UHC. Routine data that is collected has significant deficiencies and cannot be relied upon. This then leaves us with datasets from periodic household surveys to calculate the extent of population, services and financial coverage. Using such datasets from different surveys, we have estimated service coverage (preventive and curative care); population coverage (lower castes, women and rural / urban populations) and financial coverage (Out of pocket payments). India has pledged to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) by 2022. We found that while the population is reasonably covered by preventive and curative health services, financial coverage is lacking for most of these services.