As India prepares for the Union Budget 2026-27, healthcare leaders and industry experts are urging the government to rethink its approach to health spending, especially when it comes to strengthening hospital infrastructure in smaller cities and towns. Their message is clear: it’s time to go beyond token increases in funding and build a healthcare system that truly reaches every citizen, not just those in big urban centres.
The Problem: Uneven Access Across the Country
Today, much of India’s advanced healthcare remains concentrated in major metropolitan areas. Tertiary care facilities, specialised treatment centres, and well-equipped hospitals are often hard to find once you move into Tier-2 or Tier-3 cities. This creates a situation where patients have to travel long distances, sometimes hundreds of kilometres, just to receive quality care.
Experts point out that nearly 65% of India’s population lives outside the largest cities, and these communities are often the ones most in need of reliable health services.
Reproductive care and affordable fertility solutions
Dr Sheetal Jindal, MBBS, MD OBG, EPHM (IIM Kolkata), Senior Consultant and Medical Director (Director Medical Genetics program, Jindal Ivf Chandigarh, said, "As India’s healthcare sector evolves, the Union Budget 2026-27 must strategically support inclusive reproductive care and affordable fertility solutions. With healthcare allocations already expanding year-on-year to strengthen infrastructure, medical education, and universal coverage, there is a strong case for targeted incentives for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) like IVF."
She also explained, "This should include subsidies or tax relief for fertility treatments, inclusion of multiple IVF cycles under public health schemes or insurance, and enhanced funding for training and research in reproductive medicine to ensure quality outcomes nationwide. Such policy support would not only improve accessibility for millions of hopeful parents from tier-2 and tier-3 cities but also help address India’s shifting fertility trends by empowering families with choice and care. At Jindal IVF, we envision a Budget that champions equity and innovation in reproductive health, making world-class fertility care more affordable and widely available."
Preventive care and diagnostics
Mr Ajay Mahipal - Co-founder & General Partner, HealthKois, said, "Looking at the healthcare investment landscape over the last two decades, it is quite clear that the Indian ecosystem is at a massive inflexion point. As the Union Budget 2026 draws near, the narrative needs to move away from just adding more hospital beds to actually improving the quality of long-term health outcomes. If the government has the fiscal bandwidth for only one major push this year, the focus must be squarely on preventive care and diagnostics. While tertiary hospitals are vital for critical care, their involvement typically begins after the illness has progressed, placing them at the most expensive end of the healthcare value chain. Evidence shows that early detection of non-communicable diseases, particularly cardiovascular conditions, hypertension, and various cancers, can dramatically lower the national disease burden. To turn this into a ground reality, the budget should look at explicitly incentivising routine screenings, perhaps by providing tax benefits under Section 80D and rolling out performance-linked incentives for diagnostic labs that are brave enough to expand into Tier 2/3 cities."
"This shift towards a preventive model is completely tied to how technology is deployed. One must be very careful to distinguish between AI that is merely a marketing layer for patient acquisition and AI that acts as a serious clinical tool. We are seeing high-impact clinical AI already making a difference in the backend, whether it is for automated diagnostic imaging in tuberculosis, genomic profiling in oncology, or better control over hospital inventory. The next big thing is agentic AI that can actually support clinical decision-making and smooth out revenue cycle management to cut down administrative headaches. To really scale these gains, the budget needs to make sustained investment into backend health data infrastructure," he stated.
"Even though the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has done well to register over 850 million ABHA IDs, the ground-level adoption is still quite patchy because smaller players do not see the financial alignment yet. We are currently in a bit of a fragmented, app-first phase, but the real goal is true interoperability through FHIR standards. Strengthening this digital backbone will ensure that patient history flows without friction across providers, finally bringing the patient, payer, and provider into a single, aligned model. By backing these invisible layers of the health stack, the government can truly transition India from a treatment-heavy system to a unified, patient-first healthcare economy," Mr Ajay Mahipal concluded.
