Telugu Desam Party (TDP) Government in Andhra Pradesh has now completed nearly two years in power. Over those two years, network hospitals have gone unpaid for over 400 days in a row. Dr NTR Vaidya Seva scheme, the renamed diminished successor to the landmark YSR Aarogyasri Services have been suspended by Private network hospitals Andhra Pradesh Speciality Hospital Association (Asha), leaving lakhs of poor patients stranded and accumulated dues crossed ₹3,000 crore. Government hospitals already stretched with daily registrations under the scheme collapsed.
The Numbers That Cannot Be Argued With
During the five-year tenure of the Telugu Desam Party from 2014 to 2019, total expenditure under the Aarogyasri scheme amounted to ₹5,177.38 crore. Despite governing for five full years, TDP’s highest annual spend on the scheme was a mere ₹1,299.01 crore achieved only in its final year, 2018-19, as elections loomed.
YS Jagan Mohan Reddy’s government from 2019 to 2023, annual expenditure on Aarogyasri nearly a 100 percent increase over the TDP’s average annual spending. The total expenditure over five-year period reached₹9,000 crore surpassing the entire five-year outlay of the previous government .
Numbers at Glance :
What Five Years of YSRCP Healthcare Looked Like
When YS Jagan Mohan Reddy took office in 2019, he inherited a health system that TDP had kept deliberately lean. Medical procedures covered under the health scheme numbered just 1,000. Network hospitals stood at a mere 914. Total Government health spending hovered around ₹8,000 crore and Andhra Pradesh had only 12 government medical colleges for a state of five crore people.
Aarogyasri was transformed into a genuine universal coverage instrument. Covered medical procedures rose from 1,000 to 3,257. Network hospitals more than doubled from 914 to 2,261, extending coverage to hospitals in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai. Over 3.57 lakh people benefited from the scheme within 45 months of YSRCP taking office. Annual healthcare spending doubled from ₹8,000 crore under TDP to over ₹18,000 crore under Jagan. The scheme’s coverage ceiling was raised to ₹25 lakh per family the highest offered by any state health scheme in India bringing 4.25 crore people, over 80 per cent of Andhra’s population, within its embrace.
Aarogya Aasara provided lifeline support to the most vulnerable. Over ₹990 crore was spent under this scheme alone, providing dialysis support and specialist treatment to those for whom even a government hospital was financially out of reach.
The Family Doctor Programme carried healthcare to every doorstep. In April 2023, YS Jagan launched a programme placing qualified doctors in 10,032 Dr YSR Village Health Clinics across the state. The government invested ₹681.57 crore in establishing and operationalising these clinics a figure that TDP has not matched with a single rupee of equivalent primary-level investment. For the first time, a bedridden patient in a remote village in Srikakulam did not have to travel hours to Visakhapatnam. The doctor came to them. Lactating mothers, anaemic schoolchildren, patients with non-communicable diseases — all received doorstep care, free of cost. Each clinic was equipped with 64 types of medicines, 67 categories of basic medical equipment, 14 diagnostic tests, and telemedicine connectivity — not a makeshift dispensary but a functioning primary care node at the heart of every village secretariat.
17 new government medical colleges were initiated one in every district. Five were inaugurated and made fully functional. Two more — including at Pulivendula and Paderu were near completion. Land was acquired for all 17. An estimated ₹8,500 crore was committed. For a state where a private MBBS course costs upwards of ₹3 crore, government colleges offering medical education at ₹15,000 to ₹20 lakh per annum were not just infrastructure — they were social justice made concrete.
48,639 healthcare jobs were filled 100 percent of vacancies for lab technicians, general physicians, and staff nurses; 96.31 per cent for specialist doctors. Government hospitals were stocked with 562 varieties of WHO-standard medicines. The healthcare workforce that had been hollowed out under TDP was rebuilt from scratch.
Now it is the state that has failed, not the patient.YS Jagan Mohan Reddy built Andhra Pradesh in five years. He built it with data, with infrastructure, and with a philosophy that the poor deserve not charity but rights. While Chandrababu Naidu is dismantling it one unpaid hospital bill, one privatised medical college, one shuttered village clinic at a time.
