NEW DELHI: India is set to digitalize its universal multi-payer healthcare system to create “equitable access to health services,” the government said on Thursday.
In 2018, India’s National Health Authority launched a national health insurance program called Ayushman Bharat to provide healthcare to around 500 million low-income earners in the country. The government’s new initiative — the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission — is an extension of the insurance scheme that will see every citizen issued with a health ID card containing their medical data, which will be stored in a central database.
The scheme was launched earlier this week by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hailed it as a “revolutionary change in India’s healthcare facilities.”
Speaking to the media on Thursday, National Health Authority chief Dr. R.S. Sharma said: “We are creating a network of service delivery through the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, which will create affordable, equitable, quality health services for the people.”
India spends around 1 percent of its GDP on health — among the lowest percentage of any major economy. The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed 450,000 Indians between March and May, served to highlight the country’s long-standing problems with its healthcare system and lack of access to it.
“We have passed through a very difficult time, and people have realized how important health services are,” Dr. Sharma said, adding that with 1.18 billion registered mobile phone numbers — 800 million of which are used online — the country’s digital infrastructure is strong enough to support the digitalization project.
Each health ID card will contain its holder’s medical history, including diagnoses and doctor observations, which can be shared with any hospital in the country. So far, 100,000 cards have been distributed in a pilot project in six Indian states.
The scheme has been met with skepticism in some quarters.
“It will not serve the (important) purpose of providing health services to the masses,” Mumbai-based public health expert Dr. T. Sundararaman told Arab News. “It will have a limited role to play.”
India to introduce digital health ID cards
https://arab.news/j9zka
India to introduce digital health ID cards
- Push to digitize health data of country’s 1.3 billion people launched
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
