India lags on SDG3 despite progress. Explore gaps in maternal and child health, healthcare access, and the three-pillar strategy for universal well-being.

In his article, “India Needs More Focus to Reach SDG 3, a Crucial Goal” (The Hindu, September 19, 2025), Rahul Mehra identifies a paradox within India’s sustainable development journey: whilst the nation’s impressive climb to 99th in the global SDG Index reflects commendable progress, it starkly contrasts with the sluggish and uneven advancement towards SDG 3—ensuring healthy lives and well-being for all. This disparity places India at a critical healthcare crossroads. Therefore, to successfully navigate this pivotal juncture and achieve SDG 3, India must urgently implement a focused, three-pronged strategy that expands universal health coverage, fortifies primary care infrastructure, and institutes a generational shift through mandatory preventive health education. This essay makes the point that achieving this goal is not merely a statistical target; it is a fundamental prerequisite for building a truly developed and prosperous India.

The Sobering Data

A closer examination of the data reveals a concerning gap between current realities and the 2030 targets. Despite progress, the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) stands at 97 per 100,000 live births, a sobering figure far from the target of 70. Similarly, the under-five mortality rate, at 32 per 1,000 live births, lags behind the goal of 25, especially jarring when compared to rates of two to six in developed nations. Life expectancy, though improved, falls short at 70 years against a target of nearly 74. Perhaps one of the most pressing burdens on Indian families is the high rate of out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure, which at 13% of total consumption is almost double the target of 7.83%. This financial strain often forces families into poverty, creating a vicious cycle where ill health begets economic hardship. These figures are not abstract statistics; they represent millions of individual lives and families for whom quality healthcare remains out of reach.

Entrenched Barriers

The reasons for these persistent gaps are multifaceted and deeply entrenched. Firstly, there is a critical lack of access to quality healthcare, particularly in rural and tribal communities. This is often due to poor physical infrastructure—a shortage of clinics, hospitals, and trained medical professionals—compounded by economic barriers that make even basic treatment unaffordable for many. Secondly, non-economic factors play a devastating role. Issues of poor nutrition, inadequate sanitation, and unsafe hygiene practices contribute significantly to the disease burden. Furthermore, cultural practices and deep-rooted social stigma, especially surrounding mental health and reproductive issues, often prevent individuals from seeking the care that is available, rendering services ineffective even when they exist.

A Three-Pillar Blueprint

To bridge this chasm and accelerate progress, India must adopt a robust, three-pronged strategy that addresses both the treatment and, crucially, the prevention of disease. The first pillar must be the realisation of genuine Universal Health Coverage (UHC). As evidenced by World Bank studies, robust insurance systems are instrumental in shielding families from catastrophic health expenditures and ensuring equitable access. This means moving beyond schemes to a system where financial cost is not a deterrent to receiving care.

The second pillar involves revolutionising the country’s primary healthcare infrastructure. The establishment of high-quality, well-staffed Primary Health Centres (PHCs) across the nation, coupled with seamless coordination between primary, secondary, and tertiary care, is non-negotiable. The World Health Organization affirms that strong primary systems enable early disease detection, reduce hospitalisation costs, and improve long-term health outcomes. Integral to this modernisation is the harnessing of digital health tools. Telemedicine can bridge vast geographical distances, bringing specialist consultation to remote villages, while integrated digital health records can ensure continuity of care, improve vaccination tracking, and streamline health management, as successful pilot programmes in other low and middle-income countries have demonstrated.

The Generational Key

However, treatment alone is an unsustainable and costly approach. The third, and arguably most transformative, pillar of this strategy must be a profound investment in prevention through comprehensive health education integrated into the school curriculum. Preventing disease is infinitely more cost-effective than curing it. Educating schoolchildren about healthy nutrition, proper hygiene, sanitation, reproductive health, road safety, and mental well-being has the potential to catalyse a generational shift in public health. The objective is not merely to impart knowledge but to instil healthy behaviours that become lifelong habits. When educated girls become mothers, they are far more likely to advocate for their own health and that of their children, directly contributing to the reduction of MMR and under-five mortality. The long-term benefits are immense: a healthier, more productive population, reduced pressure on the healthcare system, and increased life expectancy.

International precedents offer powerful validation for this approach. Finland’s integration of lessons on nutrition and lifestyle into school curricula in the 1970s is widely credited with a dramatic reduction in cardiovascular disease rates in subsequent decades. Similarly, Japan’s emphasis on compulsory health education is linked to its world-leading hygiene standards and exceptional life expectancy. These examples provide a clear blueprint that India can adapt to its own context, developing a structured and progressive curriculum tailored to its diverse needs.

Conclusion

Ultimately, closing the SDG 3 gap requires a concerted effort that spans from the highest levels of policymaking to individual households. Policymakers have a dual responsibility: to legislate and fund the expansion of universal health coverage and primary care, and to mandate the embedding of rigorous health education into the national school curriculum. Simultaneously, parents and communities have a vital role to play. They must actively engage with their children’s education, advocate for comprehensive health topics in schools, and reinforce these lessons at home.

India’s improved SDG ranking is an encouraging milestone, but as Mehra cautions, it should not obscure the larger truth. With only 17% of global SDG targets on track, the need for urgent, focused action has never been greater. Educating the youth, supported by a stronger, more equitable healthcare system, can form the bedrock of sustainable progress. While the 2030 deadline for the SDGs is an important immediate target, the true vision must extend further. A government that prioritises the health of its citizens, beginning with its youngest minds, is not just working towards a statistic; it is laying the foundation for a Viksit Bharat (Developed India) in 2047—a nation that is not only economically powerful but also healthy, resilient, and thriving.

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The Source’s Authority and Ownership of the Article is Claimed By THE STUDY IAS BY MANIKANT SINGH

Explores India’s hybrid path blending markets and welfare, showing how the moral economy balances growth with fairness, dignity, and inclusion.

Introduction

Shashi Tharoor’s “Between Profit and Promise” (The Indian Express, September 18, 2025) situates rising global discontent with capitalism, especially among youth, within India’s own economic journey from Nehruvian socialism to post-1991 liberalisation. The central issue is how to reconcile market dynamism with fairness and dignity. His thesis rejects the outdated binary of capitalism versus socialism, arguing instead for pragmatic hybrids. The hypothesis is that blending markets with welfare can deliver both growth and inclusion. The warrant lies in historical welfare models and India’s current mix of public and private systems. Tharoor advocates designing moral economies that prioritise balance over dogma and inclusion over exclusion.

Handlooms and Human Costs

The handloom sector illustrates this tension vividly. Weaving is both an economic livelihood and a cultural marker, yet it is steadily undermined by mechanised alternatives that promise efficiency but erode dignity. In narrow market terms, cheaper, mass-produced fabrics are rational, but they devastate communities that depend on artisanal work. The loss is not only of jobs but of identity, tradition, and regional stability. This clash between capitalist progress and human fairness exemplifies the challenge of reconciling efficiency with equity.

Despite these pressures, handloom weaving has not disappeared. It has endured through strategies that reflect a moral economy in action. By valorising tradition, fabrics are marketed as heritage goods whose value lies in authenticity, not merely price. Public support through subsidies and certification schemes reaffirms that livelihoods and cultural assets merit safeguarding. Hybrid production methods, blending artisanal skills with modern marketing and distribution, show that survival does not require abandoning identity but adapting it intelligently. These strategies demonstrate that markets can be recalibrated to recognise social values as integral, not incidental.

Precarity in Modern Sectors

The dilemmas of handloom workers resonate beyond traditional crafts. The gig economy, often hailed as a symbol of innovation, repeats the same story of precarious livelihoods hidden beneath the gloss of flexibility and consumer convenience. Drivers, delivery personnel, and freelancers often lack protections, fair pay, and stability. Their struggles for recognition and rights represent another form of moral economy: collective insistence that technological progress must not come at the cost of human security. Here too, the question is not whether markets should exist but how they are structured, whose interests they privilege, and what safeguards they embed.

Even the technology sector, emblem of twenty-first-century dynamism, reflects similar contradictions. Its extraordinary wealth creation sits uneasily alongside exclusion, monopolistic power, and stark disparities in access. Calls for fair taxation, ethical standards, and regulatory checks echo the same moral logic: that innovation, however dazzling, cannot justify systems that leave millions behind. These parallels show that the moral economy is not confined to tradition but stretches across modern industries, demanding balance in every sphere.

 India’s Hybrid Path

India’s broader economic journey underlines this hybrid reality. The early decades of independence were marked by a socialist-inspired model prioritising equity, state ownership, and cautious global engagement. By the late 1980s, inefficiency and fiscal crises exposed the limits of that approach, leading to the sweeping liberalisation of 1991. Market reforms unleashed growth, expanded the middle class, and spurred a technological renaissance. Yet the promises of liberalisation have been unevenly realised. Jobless growth, wealth concentration, and rural distress fuel growing scepticism.

The result is neither a pure capitalist state nor a socialist one but a complex amalgam. Glittering private hospitals stand beside underfunded public clinics, while stock market booms coexist with farmer protests and gig workers’ struggles. India embodies a pragmatic hybrid: a society where welfare schemes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) sit alongside start-up culture and corporate giants. This hybridity is not confusion but necessity, born of recognition that extremes of ideology cannot address the needs of a populous, diverse, and aspirational nation.

Global Lessons

This pragmatic blending finds echoes worldwide. The welfare states of post-war Europe were not just about economic reconstruction but about rebuilding social trust. Britain’s National Health Service was founded on the conviction that healthcare should not be a commodity but a right of citizenship. Such institutions illustrate the principle that markets must be complemented by protections for fundamental human needs. The lesson is enduring: societies that fail to embed markets within systems of solidarity risk alienation, unrest, and collapse.

Yet the debate today has evolved in vocabulary. It is less about abstract ideological loyalties than about practical outcomes. People ask whether their economies deliver prosperity, security, and opportunity. They judge systems not by labels but by lived experiences. The dissatisfaction voiced by young people across the world reflects a demand for economies that respect dignity, not a call to revive dogmatic socialism or unregulated capitalism. When they invoke “socialism”, they often mean compassion over competition; when they critique capitalism, they question its exclusionary tendencies, not its capacity to generate innovation.

Towards a Moral Economy

The moral economy lens is powerful precisely because it transcends sterile binaries. It asks not whether one aligns with capitalism or socialism but whether the system in place delivers fairness. This perspective exposes the inadequacy of simplistic polemics: dismissing socialism by citing authoritarian regimes, or condemning capitalism as inherently exploitative, ignores the complex hybrids most modern societies have become. Regulations, redistributive taxation, and welfare nets have long integrated socialist principles into capitalist frameworks, just as innovation and enterprise have flourished under socialist-leaning governments.

Critical reflection, however, is essential. Overprotecting traditional sectors can ossify inefficiencies, discourage creativity, and limit opportunity. Cultural branding sustains niches but cannot substitute for large-scale employment. The challenge lies in balancing dignity with transformation, crafting policies that protect without paralysing. Moreover, the moral economy raises the question of whose values prevail. In unequal societies, elites may shape norms to their advantage. A genuinely inclusive moral economy must be vigilant against reinforcing privilege under the guise of protection, ensuring that the marginalised remain central to the conversation.

Constructive Dissatisfaction and Future Directions

The optimism in current debates lies in their very intensity. Discontent signals engagement, not apathy. People’s insistence on fairness reflects enduring belief that economies can and should be organised more justly. The so-called “magic of the market” means little to those excluded from it; their demands for inclusion are not destructive but constructive. They point the way towards more compassionate and pragmatic systems, rooted in the conviction that the economy must serve society, not the other way round.

The task ahead is to design systems that are intelligent, compassionate, and pragmatic—capable of harnessing capitalist dynamism without succumbing to its excesses, and borrowing from socialist ideals without lapsing into rigidity. Most successful economies are already hybrids, capitalist in structure yet infused with social protections reflecting a collective sense of fairness. The quest for a moral economy is thus not nostalgia for the past but a forward-looking imperative, demanding that progress be measured by the dignity and inclusion it affords, not merely by growth rates.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, the true divide is not between capitalism and socialism but between economies that serve human beings and those that leave them behind. India, with its pluralism, pragmatism, and long tradition of hybrid solutions, is well placed to lead this global conversation. The goal is not victory in an ideological battle but the construction of societies where fewer people fall through the cracks, where balance replaces dogma, and where profit never eclipses promise.

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The Source’s Authority and Ownership of the Article is Claimed By THE STUDY IAS BY MANIKANT SINGH