Yeshasvini scheme will be revived: Kumaraswamy

It was scrapped to make way for Ayushman Bharat Yojana

Blessing them: Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, his wife Anitha Kumaraswamy and Suttur Mutt seer Shivarathri Deshikendra Swami at a mass marriage ceremony at Suttur near Mysuru on Saturday.

Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy on Saturday said the Yeshasvini Health Insurance Scheme would be revived in the coming State Budget.

Mr. Kumaraswamy told reporters at Suttur, near here, that had received complaints about inconvenience faced by patients after the scheme was scrapped to make way for various health schemes such as the Centre’s Ayushman Bharat Yojana. The Yeshasvini scheme would be brought back for the benefit of patients seeking tertiary care, he said.\

Mr. Kumaraswamy lashed out at the Centre for claiming credit for health schemes for which States were bearing the cost. Though Karnataka had rolled out its own Arogya Karnataka health scheme, the Centre requested the State to merge it with the Ayushman Bharat Yojana. “The Centre bears only ₹200 crore while the State spends more than ₹700 crore annually on the scheme,” he said. He appealed to the people of the State not to be misled by the publicity being carried out by the Centre attributing the health scheme to the Narendra Modi government.

It is not just Karnataka that was bearing a major share of expenditure on Ayushman Bharat. Even Tamil Nadu was spending more than the Centre on the scheme in that State, he said.

‘State’s proposals ignored’

Mr. Kumaraswamy said the Union Budget presented on Friday ignored all the proposals made by the State. No projects were sanctioned for Karnataka in the budget despite proposals, including suburban rail for Bengaluru, being submitted to the Centre. It was not just the non-BJP-governed States that have been ignored, even the ones where the party was in power had not benefited from the budget, he said.

Referring to the Prime Minister’s Kisan Samman Nidhi, which promises ₹6,000 a year in instalments to small and marginal farmers, the Chief Minister said that merely 59 lakh families in Karnataka would come under its purview. Each beneficiary family would receive no more than ₹17 a day, he added.

He said a section of the middle class had also been “cheated” by the proposal on income tax relief only to those earning up to ₹5 lakh a year.

Loopholes in the proposals would be known after auditors begin examining them, he said.