The budget doesn’t lives up to the heightened expectations of a weary population waiting for manna from the government. A lot more could have been done to address the chronic underinvestment in India’s public health infrastructure by appreciably raising expenditure. The Union Budget for 2021-2022 presented to Parliament on February 1, instead reveals an estimated health outlay of Rs74,602 crore, almost 10% lower than the revised estimate of Rs82,445 crore earmarked for health spending in the current fiscal year. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman however, has claimed a 137% increase in the budgetary outlay on ‘health and wellbeing’ by including a one-time expenditure of Rs35,000 crore set aside for the COVID-19 vaccination programme, Rs60,030 crore budgeted for the department of drinking water and sanitation, as well as the Finance Commission’s grants for both water and sanitation and health totalling to almost Rs50,000 crore. The availability of vaccines, ensuring universal access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation and adequate nutrition are all key in determining a population’s wellbeing. However, an abiding thrust on creating and maintaining a sizeably more extensive public health infrastructure needed a substantially higher outlay on the standalone head. The Minister did announce that the government intends to introduce a new centrally sponsored scheme, ‘PM Atma Nirbhar Swasth Bharat Yojana’, to develop primary, secondary, and tertiary care capacities over the next six years, at an estimated cost of Rs64,180 crore. How exactly this scheme pans out in terms of strengthening the beleaguered public health infrastructure in the remote and far-flung corners could well determine how prepared India is for the next unforeseen health emergency. In short, the health-focused budget wasn’t so healthy.