Health Minister J P Nadda on Friday announced that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would formally launch the expanded Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY) scheme and the vaccination tracking portal U-WIN next month while addressing a press conference highlighting the ministry’s achievements in the first 100 days of the Modi 3.0 government.
This comes after the central government announced expanding the coverage of AB-PMJAY to include all senior citizens aged 70 and above, without any income cap. The scheme provides a cashless and paperless benefit cover of Rs 5 lakh per annum per family on a floater basis in empanelled hospitals across India.
According to data from the National Health Authority (NHA), the scheme has so far covered over 354 million citizens by providing them with PMJAY cards to avail Rs 5 lakh for health insurance.
While the U-WIN portal is already operational on a pilot basis, with 64.6 million beneficiaries already registered on it, the expanded PMJAY would be implemented from October this year, benefiting around 60 million eligible individuals aged 70 and above across 45 million families.
Nadda also announced the availability of a new and efficacious regimen for tuberculosis (TB) under the National TB Elimination Programme (NTEP). He claimed that the new regimen would help reduce the treatment duration from nine to twelve months to six months.
“The government is preparing a detailed rollout plan for logistics and training of health professionals for the introduction of this new regimen early next year. This is expected to reduce the duration of the treatment regimen in approximately 75,000 drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) cases across the country,” Nadda said.
The minister also announced that all issues related to the allotment of land for the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Darbhanga, pending for over three years, have been finally settled. “The Government of Bihar has allotted and handed over 150.13 acres of land required for the institute,” he added.
First Published: Sep 20 2024 | 6:31 PM IST
