Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, the government’s health insurance scheme, completed eight years on 23 September 2026. According to a report by DD India, the scheme was launched on 23 September 2018, and by September 2026 more than 48.51 crore people, about 33% of India’s population, held Ayushman cards.
The scheme has paid for a large volume of treatment. It has financed about 13.25 crore hospital admissions worth Rs 2.03 lakh crore through more than 38,000 empanelled public and private hospitals. Each family is covered up to Rs 5 lakh a year, and the scheme covers 1,961 procedures across 27 medical specialties, according to the report.
A recent expansion extended cover to older people. The report says that about 6 crore senior citizens aged 70 and above are eligible under the expansion, and that 1.36 crore cards have been created for them so far, as well as 44.81 lakh cards for ASHA and Anganwadi workers. That means that only a fraction of the eligible older population has so far received a card, a gap that the numbers show clearly, since 1.36 crore is about 23% of 6 crore on IndiaX24’s arithmetic.
The digital side of the programme is also large. The report lists 97.61 crore ABHA health IDs, 119.95 crore health records linked and more than 50 crore teleconsultations. These figures belong to the wider Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and not to the insurance scheme alone, and they show how the government has tried to build a digital layer on top of the insurance system.
The budget gives a sense of scale. One report says that the 2026-27 Union Budget allocation for the scheme is Rs 9,500 crore. Against that, treatment worth Rs 2.03 lakh crore has been provided in eight years, which is an average of about Rs 25,000 crore a year, although the financing is shared between the Centre and the states and the cumulative figure should not be compared directly with a single year’s budget.
The infrastructure behind the scheme is the PM-ABHIM mission, which had a budget of Rs 64,180 crore for 2021 to 2026, according to the report. The sources reviewed for this article do not describe the outcomes of that spending, and no claim is made here.
One recent change was in West Bengal, which signed an agreement with the National Health Authority in June 2026 and became part of the scheme. A separate IndiaX24 article covers that. As a result, the number of states and union territories in the scheme has grown, though the DD India report does not list states that remain outside it.
What are the limits? The figures count cards and admissions, not outcomes. They do not show how many patients faced out-of-pocket costs, whether hospitals refused to admit patients under the scheme or how quickly claims were paid, which are issues that have been raised in other states. Independent evaluations are needed to answer those questions.
The eight-year numbers show that PM-JAY has become one of the largest public health insurance programmes in the world by coverage, and that the next phase will depend on reaching eligible people, including the older population, and on the quality of care.
Featured image: A hospital in Ichapuram (file photo; a stand-in image for an empanelled hospital). Photo by Palagiri, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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