India should spend more on health: Bill Gates

NEW DELHI: Reminding India that it faces "some of the toughest health problems in the world", Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Saturday urged the country to drastically increase health spending to eliminate the most persisting diseases plaguing its people.

"The Indian government must accelerate its progress toward its health spending targets, so that innovations benefit the poor people who really need them," he said while receiving the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from President Pratibha Patil at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Pointing out that the country "bears a massive burden of disease", he drew a roadmap for the next five years to attack the most pervasive health problems. Gates said, "It will take a major investment of effort and money to add vaccines, but it is a sound investment."

In a tacit censure of a sloppy delivery system, he said, "It is also imperative that new money for health be spent wisely -- and in transparent ways...keeping good data and analyzing it rigorously to determine the impact your investments are having."

Calling for steps to hold people accountable for results, he said, "India is one of many countries where the reported vaccine coverage rate is much higher than the actual coverage rate."

However, he assured India of sustained and strong support from his Foundation and said the entrepreneurial spirit and technological sophistication of India convinced him of the country's ability to reach its health goals in the coming years.

Conferring the award on Gates, President Pratibha Patil said that like Indira Gandhi, the philanthropist, too, has seen the "road ahead".

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hoped that Gates' transformation from a successful businessman to a philanthropist would inspire many business tycoons in India to take up similar work. "More of our business leaders and our wealthy will learn to share their wealth with the people of their country, by investing in their education, their health and the care of the elderly and the disabled," he said.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi said that Gates' "extraordinary success as a businessman has been overtaken by your even more extraordinary impact as a philanthropist".