For decades, India built its public health system around clearly visible and urgent challenges. From cholera outbreaks, to managing pandemic situation, and maternal deaths in villages without trained midwives. This approach was appropriate for its time and proved highly effective, and the architects of this system deserve credit for what they achieved under severe constraints. However, India's health challenges have changed, and the system has not evolved at the same pace.
Today, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory conditions, chronic kidney disease, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease account for approximately 60 percent of all deaths in India; which is roughly 5.87 million lives lost annually to noncommunicable diseases. Most of these deaths have occurred because of lack of risk control, lack of screening, and lack of timely intervention because of high costs.
In this article, Dr. Sabine Kapasi, Global Health Strategist, Founder of ROPAN Healthcare, and UN advisor, tells us more about Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs).
Non-Communicable Diseases Drain Household Finances
Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) strike hardest between the ages of 40 and 65. This is not incidental. These are the working years, the years when families depend on a breadwinner, when children are still in school, when savings are just beginning to accumulate. A cardiac event at 48 not only threatens one person's survival. It removes income, exhausts whatever financial reserves a household has built, and in many cases pulls children out of education permanently. The downstream consequences persist for a generation.
WHO placed the total economic cost of NCDs in India between 2012 and 2030 at $3.55 trillion. That estimate excludes mental health entirely. No health ministry budget can absorb that figure in isolation, yet finance ministries remain largely absent from this conversation. That absence is a policy failure in itself. Health outcomes at this scale are a macroeconomic problem, and they require macroeconomic engagement.