The Draft National Health Research Policy 2026 asks India to sextuple its health research spending within a generation. It does not say, in any binding way, where that money will come from.
There is a particular kind of confidence that governments reserve for numbers set far enough into the future that no one currently in office will be asked to account for them. The Draft National Health Research Policy 2026, circulated by the Department of Health Research for public comment ahead of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s July consultation deadline, contains one such number. It proposes that India’s expenditure on health research, presently a modest 0.024 per cent of GDP, should rise to 0.072 per cent by 2037 and to 0.15 per cent by 2047 — a sixfold increase, timed to converge with the centenary aspirations of Viksit Bharat @2047.
Read in isolation, the trajectory is unremarkable; every ambitious policy document sets an ambitious target. Read against the arithmetic of India’s public finances, it becomes a considerably more interesting document — not for what it promises, but for what it declines to guarantee.
A Target Without a Lock
India’s total public healthcare expenditure has, for the better part of two decades, hovered between 1.3 and 1.5 per cent of GDP, of which health research has historically claimed a sliver. The draft policy’s own baseline figure — 0.024 per cent — is drawn from the combined allocations of three departments: the Department of Health Research, the Department of Biotechnology, and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. To move that figure sixfold over twenty years without a corresponding change in the machinery that decides annual budgets is to ask a great deal of political continuity, across an unknown number of governments, finance ministers, and competing national priorities.
What the draft does not propose — and this is the crux of the matter — is any statutory mechanism that would survive a change in political will. There is no non-lapsable health research fund written into the text. There is no earmarked cess, of the kind that already finances education and, in various forms, sanitation and infrastructure. There is no legislated minimum share of the health budget reserved for research, comparable to the ring-fenced science budgets that Britain has maintained through successive governments, or the constitutionally anchored cooperative funding arrangements that underwrite Germany’s dual system of federal and Länder research finance.
A target recorded in a policy memorandum binds only the government that wrote it. A target written into statute binds the ones that follow.
This is not a pedantic distinction. India already possesses a working template for exactly this kind of commitment: the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, established by Act of Parliament in 2023, which draws statutory, earmarked resources for research and innovation across disciplines. The health research policy gestures toward the ANRF as a partner institution for mobilising investment, but stops short of proposing anything comparably binding for its own targets. The distance between citing a good precedent and legislating one is precisely the distance between an aspiration and a commitment.
The Comparative Weight of the Number
It is worth placing India’s proposed ceiling of 0.15 per cent of GDP by 2047 beside the current reality elsewhere. The United States spends over 3.4 per cent of GDP on health research and development in total, public and private combined, anchored by an NIH budget that exceeds forty billion dollars annually and has survived changes of administration for the better part of seven decades — not because any single law guarantees it forever, but because sustained congressional appropriation has, over generations, become its own kind of institutional gravity. India is proposing, by contrast, to reach a fraction of that intensity by mid-century, and to do so principally through sustained annual increases in Union budget allocation — a mechanism that depends entirely on the discretion of each year’s Finance Bill.
The policy is not naive about this. Its own supporting text acknowledges that state-level investment and private-sector research and development will need to be tracked separately to understand how the growth is actually composed, an implicit admission that public funding alone may not carry the full weight of the ambition. But acknowledging a dependency is not the same as building the instrument that resolves it.
What Finalisation Should Address
None of this is an argument against the policy’s underlying ambition, which is sound and, frankly, overdue. India’s health research enterprise has for decades been constrained less by scientific talent — of which the country has an abundance, much of it exported — than by the administrative and financial architecture surrounding it. The proposed multidimensional impact evaluation framework, the professionalisation of grant administration through dedicated Research Administration and Finance Units, and the attempt to route research findings directly into state health systems are all structurally serious proposals.
But a ministry that is serious about a sixfold increase in research spending over two decades owes the exercise a financing instrument as serious as the target itself. A statutory, non-lapsable National Health Research Fund, drawing earmarked allocations from the central health budget and, where appropriate, a dedicated share of health-related cess revenue, would convert the 2047 target from a number in a memorandum into a number in law. Absent that, the policy’s most ambitious commitment remains exactly what it currently is: a promise that binds no one beyond the term of the government that wrote it.
The consultation window on the draft has closed; the Ministry now weighs the submissions it received. Whether the final document treats its own central target as a statute or as a sentiment will say a great deal about how seriously it expects to be held to it.
– Gopichand Bhattaram
