Life Expectancy In India

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines life expectancy as “the average number of years a person is expected to live on the basis of current mortality rate and prevalence distribution of health states in a population” In India, the average life expectancy which used to be around 48 in 1980 rose to 62 in 2000 and is almost 70 years in 2015. The reasons for the improvement attributes to better availability of food, health and medical facilities. However with increase in life expectancy experts warn increase in disease burden. Increase in life expectancy beyond 70 years would depend on many environmental factors such as clean drinking water, pollution free environment and better control of non-communicable diseases. So the

It thus becomes imperative to address the growing concerns of the elderly population like investment in pension, insurance and quality healthcare. If these issues are not addressed promptly then the consequences can bring down the country by surprise just like it happened with China. Another serious issue associated with increasing life expectancy and rapidly ageing population is the increase in chronic diseases. India is experiencing increasing incidence of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, hypertension, diabetes, mental disorders, high blood pressure cancer and injuries leading to death and disability in the next two decades or so. In 2010, India boasted the largest number of diabetic patients in the world, with more than 41 million sufferers. According to a 2007 report from PwC, this is projected to reach 73.5 million by 2025. Although a wide range of cost-effective prevention strategies are available but lack in implementation especially among the poor people and the ones living in rural areas. In India most of the health care provided is by the private sector which are often expensive and out of budget that leads to debt and impoverishment for both salaried and poor people. There is a dire need to scale up cost effective health care systems, formulate strong public policies to control chronic disease and robustly implement

From our above projections one can clearly observe that the share of chronic diseases in total deaths is rising while the share of communicable disease is declining. In 2005, the deaths due to chronic disease were only 16% while it is projected to increase to 19% by 2030.

Healthcare Sector in India

Healthcare sector in India has become one of the largest sectors both in terms of employment and revenue. This sector comprises of hospitals, medical equipments, health insurance, clinical trials, medical outsourcing etc. The Indian healthcare sector is growing at fast pace due to the availability of quality doctors, technology, strengthening coverage, increasing services and expenditure by both public and private players.

Indian healthcare delivery system is categorized into two major components - public and private. The public healthcare system owned, controlled and managed by the government provides limited secondary and tertiary care institutions in key cities and focuses on providing basic healthcare facilities in the form of primary healthcare centers (PHCs) in rural areas. The private sector is owned, controlled and managed by private players provide majority of secondary, tertiary and quaternary care institutions with a major concentration in metros, tier I and tier II cities. India's competitive advantage is due to its large pool of well-trained medical professionals and it is cost effective in