Key Facts: NITI Aayog’s Health Index Report

NITI Aayog has released Health Index Report titled “Healthy States, Progressive India. It ranks states and union territories based on their year-on-year incremental change in health outcomes and compare their overall performance with respect to each other

Components

The index is based on scores from three domains

• Health Outcomes
• Governance and Information
• Key Inputs and Processes

Significance of the report

The report will aid in various effectively addressing the problems in health sector of the country by:

Policy Formulation

State Wise performance report will aid in formulating tailor made policies for states and even at district levels to address the shortcomings than usual one size fits all approach.

Objective approach

The objective criteria’s will aid in interlinking the objective outcomes with the spending under national health mission. This helps in understanding the efficacy of the mission.

Co-operative federalism

The mechanisms also will bring into light the various best practices in various states. Niti Aayog a policy think tank which is also the coordinating agency for the SDGs in India with these objective criteria’s can achieve nexus between centre-state, state-state to adopt best practices.

Competitive federalism

As the index ranks the states and Union territories it will imbibe competitive spirit among the states to achieve the excellence. The indices show a strong link between health outcomes with HDI and economic development of the state.

Limitations

The report has two main limitations viz. Data limitations and reduced incentives as follows:

Data limitations

• Lack of structured data with respect to healthcare was mentioned in the report. This is a handicap in effective formulation and implementation of policies.

Reduced Incentives

• States and UTs that start at lower levels of development are generally at an advantage in notching up incremental progress over States with high Health Index scores, it is a challenge for States with high Index scores to even maintain their performance levels. This may reduce the incentives for states at higher level of development.

The findings of the report clearly underlined the importance of the public health institutions in delivering the outcomes. The well performing states had a better HDI, sound Public health when compared to rest of the country. Hence building of strong public health care institutions with socialisation of medicine with a reliance on taxation to fund basic programmes is the bedrock of a good health system.