The Budget may have been a winner for some sectors but as far as healthcare and pharma is concerned, it was a mixed bag. Of course there was some import duty rejig, but the sector's long standing demand for an infrastructure status for hospitals was not even touched upon.

Every day we hear that the government wants to spend billions of dollars on this sector, but this year's budget was quite disappointing for healthcare.

Shivinder Mohan Singh, MD of Fortis Healthcare, said, “Our sector has not been well understood by the government. A couple of different things come under the same bracket and all of this is bucketed under healthcare. The budget has largely ignored us.”

The government did halve import duty on some life saving drugs to 5 per cent, but the weighted deduction of 150 per cent on research and development was not extended beyond this fiscal.

Dr Swati A Piramal, director of Nicholas Piramal, said, “Pharma R&D is different from the others. It needs enormous amounts of money and therefore it needs tax credits. Isreal, Taiwan, Canada and Korea do give tax credits.”

The industry players say an infrastructure status to hospitals would have opened huge opportunities for the sector like attracting international patients to India.

Singh said, “What we need is change trajectory of the way the industry is growing, 84 per cent of hospitals are below 30 beds, which don’t have the quality to do the big stuff. If we want to be able to attract international patients we need large institutional quality hospitals.”

Perhaps, the only thing the healthcare industry is a little pleased about is government decision not to raise excise duty and also the implementation of the goods and service tax by next year.