It is an exciting time for India to see, whether the government can move faster than it has historically, Bill Gates told NDTV.
The world's richest man Bill Gates today called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to "double or more than double" what India spends on healthcare services.
Speaking on NDTV's The Buck Stops Here in New York, Mr Gates and his wife Melinda - known globally for their philanthropy and activism said that the current low spending - just over one per cent of the country's Gross Domestic Product or GDP was a "gigantic concern."
"There is no way that philanthropy, all philanthropy put together can solve that problem. The numbers are just too big. Philanthropy can come in funding the pilot programs and it can come in measure, national health missions and see if all the right things are happening. But the basic spending on health has to go up substantially. It may come from the state level, also you have state plus federal and as the taxation system becomes clear, maybe that split will be more clear but India is going to have to double, more than double but at least start with the doubling of what it spends on health to get to a decent level of the basic services," Bill Gates told NDTV on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly where he also met PM Modi.
Describing his impressions of PM Modi, Mr Gates said the PM's energy had created huge expectations.
"Well, it is fantastic, that he's brought a higher expectation, a higher expectation about financial services, about sanitation, about reforming the tax system and his energy, saying to the bureaucracy, let's move! Now he's got another challenge in that, people would expect those things to really happen. So the next few years would be very key for him, you know, we are going to try and help in the areas we understand to help him to achieve those ambitious targets, but it's an exciting time for the country to see, whether the government can move faster than it has historically," Mr Gates said.
Commenting on the many contradictions of India - the aspirations, the energy, the growth story and the entrenched socio-economic, inequities, Mr Gates told NDTV, "In India the poverty and the rich part are kind of mixed together. When you go to South Africa, there is the rich part and there is the poor part and that's more segregated. In India, you know, Mukesh's (Ambani) house, the worst slums, they are all there together and so, you know, it is a part of the beauty of India not that means that people are sometimes not seen the poor part because they get to use to it. I was on a plane flying in to Bangalore once and then, an executive said to me, we don't have slums and right then, we flew over a slum. We see the progress but nobody should deny that the work to be done in sanitation and in nutrition, it's a gigantic and anybody who highlights that which Modi has been great on, that alone is valuable."
Melinda Gates, whose passion is equality for women and girls, told NDTV, "We have tried very hard to make sure that the conversations we have with our son, who is our middle child and our daughters are the same. Bill, when he was very busy at Microsoft would take Saturday mornings to do Science with the kids and he did it with both our daughter and our son. And I think that's a very important message that the father believes that their daughter can be good in Science. Both of our daughters like Science and Math actually quite a bit and I think they need that message from him and they need the same messages from me. They can do whatever it is they want to do in the world."