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National Health Profile 2018
Health Infrastructure
Highlights
Health infrastructure is an important indicator for understanding the health care delivery provisions and
welfare mechanism in a country. Infrastructure has been described as the basic support for the delivery of public
health activities. It also signifies the investments and priority accorded to create the infrastructure in public and
private sectors.
This section on Health Infrastructure indicators is subdivided into two categories viz. educational infrastructure
and service infrastructure. Educational infrastructure provides details of medical colleges, students admitted to
M.B.B.S. course, post graduate degree/diploma in medical and dental colleges, admissions to BDS &MDS courses,
AYUSH Institutes, nursing courses and paramedical courses. Service infrastructure in health includes details of
allopathic hospitals, hospital beds, Indian System of Medicine & Homeopathy hospitals, sub centers, PHC, CHC,
blood banks, eye banks, and mental hospitals.
Medical education infrastructures in the country have shown rapid growth during the last 26 years.
The country has 476 medical colleges, 313 Dental Colleges for BDS & 249 Dental Colleges for MDS.
There has been a total admission of 52,646 in 462 Medical Colleges and 27,060 in BDS and 6,233 in
MDS during 2017-18 (Table 6.1.1 & 6.1.2)
India has 3,215 Institutions producing 1,29,926 General Nurse Midwives annually and 777 colleges
for Pharmacy (Diploma) with an intake capacity of 46795 as on 31st October, 2017 (Table 6.1.4)
There are 23,582 hospitals having 7,10,761 beds in the country. 19,810 hospitals are in rural area
with 2,79,588 beds and 3,772 hospital are in Urban area with 43,1,173 beds (Table 6.2.2)
Medical care facilities under AYUSH by management status i.e. dispensaries & hospitals are 27,698
and 3,943 respectively as on 1.4.2017 (Table 6.2.5).
Health-care is the right of every individual. 60% of population of India is rural population. A majority
of 700 million people lives in rural areas and to cater their health needs, there are 1,56,231 Sub
Centres, 25,650 Primary Health Centres and 5,624 Community Health Centres in India as on 31st
March 2017 (Table 6.2.1).
Total no. of licensed Blood Banks in the Country as on June, 2017 is 2903. (Table 6.2.6).
The Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) was started under the Ministry of Health and Family
Welfare in 1954 with the objective of providing comprehensive medical care facilities to Central
Government employees, pensioners and their dependents residing in CGHS covered cities. At present,
CGHS has health facilities in 37 cities having 287 Allopathic Dispensaries and 85 AYUSH Dispensaries
in the Country with 10,82,913 registered cards/ families (Table 6.2.8 and 6.2.9).
Public insurance companies had a higher share of coverage and premium for all types of health
insurance policies, except family floater policies including individual policies. (Table 4.3.5)
Compared to countries that have either Universal Health Coverage or moving towards it, India’s per
capita public spending on health is low. (Figure 4.4.3 and Table 4.4.1)