India is proposing doubling healthcare spending in an annual budget unveiled on Monday and lifting caps on foreigners investing in its vast insurance market to help revive an economy that suffered its deepest-ever slump as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Delivering her budget statement to Parliament, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman projected a fiscal deficit of 6.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) for 2021/2022, higher than the 5.5 percent forecast by a recent poll of economists carried out by the Reuters news agency. The current fiscal year ending on March 31 was expected to close out with a deficit of 9.5 percent, she said, much higher than the government’s earlier projection of 7 percent.