Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana: RSBY Card Status 2026

⚙️How RSBY Worked

The scheme was funded with a premium split of 75 percent from the Central government and 25 percent from the State government. States chose a public sector insurer or private insurer through competitive bidding to administer the scheme in their state, and the insurer managed hospital empanelment and claim processing.

Enrollment under RSBY was done through special camps organized in districts and blocks, where BPL beneficiaries gave their fingerprint biometric and had their photograph captured by the enrollment operator. Each family received a smart card based on the SCOSTA (Smart Card OS for Transport Applications) standard that could be used at any empanelled hospital across the country.

The RSBY smart card carried the details of up to five family members and worked at any empanelled RSBY hospital nationwide, giving it national portability. A family enrolled in Bihar could get treatment at an RSBY-empanelled hospital in Delhi, Gujarat or Maharashtra without any additional paperwork, which was a significant innovation for migrant worker families.

📉Coverage and Its Limits

Pre-existing diseases were covered from the very first day under RSBY, unlike many private health insurance products that imposed waiting periods of two to four years for pre-existing conditions. This feature made the scheme genuinely useful for the poor who typically suffer from chronic conditions rooted in poverty and limited nutrition.

RSBY's coverage of Rs 30,000 per family per year was, however, inadequate for most secondary and tertiary care procedures, especially as medical costs rose through the late 2000s and early 2010s. A single hospital admission for a heart condition or cancer treatment could exhaust the annual limit within one or two procedures.

All secondary hospitalisation procedures (requiring at least one night in hospital) that the state government listed in its RSBY package were covered. The standard package included over 700 procedures ranging from cataract surgery to hernia repair, appendectomy, fracture treatment, dialysis and childbirth-related complications.

🔄Why RSBY Merged Into Ayushman Bharat

In 2018, the Modi government launched Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY), a new health insurance scheme with Rs 5 lakh cover per family per year. RSBY was formally merged into Ayushman Bharat, and all RSBY beneficiaries were automatically upgraded to PM-JAY eligibility with the significantly higher coverage amount.

The merger of RSBY into Ayushman Bharat meant that RSBY cardholders did not need to re-register from scratch. States transitioned existing RSBY data into the PM-JAY beneficiary database, and new Ayushman Bharat health cards (popularly called the golden card) were issued in place of RSBY smart cards at Common Service Centres and government offices.

RSBY empanelled hospitals had to install biometric readers and IT infrastructure at the front desk to authenticate beneficiaries using the smart card and fingerprint reader. This technology-first approach reduced fraud, as each admission was authenticated in real time against the central RSBY server rather than relying on paper records.

📋RSBY vs Ayushman Bharat: Key Differences

✅What Changed for Beneficiaries

Ayushman Bharat health cards are issued in the name of each family member individually, unlike RSBY which issued one family smart card, with each person getting their own ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account) card linked to Aadhaar. This ABHA card serves both as a health insurance identity and as a digital health record holder, a significant improvement over the RSBY model.

The hospital network under Ayushman Bharat is substantially larger than the RSBY hospital list. While RSBY had around 10,000 to 12,000 empanelled hospitals at its peak, Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY has over 30,000 empanelled hospitals across India including public sector hospitals in every state, private hospitals, and hospitals run by trusts and charities.

Hospitals submitted claims electronically through the RSBY IT platform and were paid within defined timelines. The scheme had a district-level monitoring unit and insurance company field staff who conducted physical audits of empanelled hospitals to verify admissions and prevent fraud.

🧭What You Should Do Now

For residents of states other than West Bengal, the question of RSBY coverage is now straightforward: RSBY no longer exists as a separate scheme and has been replaced by Ayushman Bharat PMJAY since 2018. Former RSBY beneficiaries should check their eligibility on pmjay.gov.in and obtain an Ayushman Bharat golden card if they have not already done so.

Families holding old RSBY smart cards should not use them at hospitals, as the scheme is closed and the backend server no longer validates RSBY transactions. They should obtain an Ayushman Bharat golden card (in most states) or a Swasthya Sathi card (in West Bengal) to continue accessing cashless hospital treatment.

More than 35 states and union territories eventually implemented RSBY, covering over 3.6 crore families at its peak. The scheme demonstrated that a large-scale technology-driven health insurance programme was operationally feasible in India, providing the institutional learning and IT architecture that later informed the design of Ayushman Bharat.

🏛️The West Bengal Case

West Bengal did not adopt Ayushman Bharat under the Mamata Banerjee government. RSBY in WB was superseded by the Swasthya Sathi scheme launched in December 2016, which provided Rs 5 lakh cashless cover with no central government funding, and former RSBY cardholders in WB were enrolled in Swasthya Sathi automatically.

In May 2026, after the BJP formed the West Bengal government following the state assembly election, the new cabinet approved the adoption of Ayushman Bharat PMJAY in WB. The transition is expected to bring WB RSBY and Swasthya Sathi beneficiaries fully into the national Ayushman Bharat network, giving them coverage at hospitals across India for the first time.

The Ayushman Bharat scheme is administered by the National Health Authority (NHA), and eligibility is determined by the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011 data for rural families and the National Urban Livelihoods Mission occupational criteria for urban families. Families who were RSBY beneficiaries may already be in the Ayushman Bharat beneficiary list based on SECC data.

👷Unorganised Workers and Welfare Boards

Unorganised sector workers such as construction labourers, domestic workers, rickshaw pullers, street vendors, ragpickers, agricultural workers and beedi workers were the primary target group for RSBY. These groups are also prioritised under Ayushman Bharat and under various state health schemes, recognizing that formal employment-linked health insurance (ESIC) does not reach them.

Unorganised sector workers who were enrolled under RSBY through welfare board registrations (construction workers, beedi workers, etc.) are covered under Ayushman Bharat through a separate channel: the Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW) welfare boards in their state. BOCW-registered workers should check with their state BOCW office to confirm their Ayushman Bharat enrollment.

Researchers and policy analysts often cite RSBY as both a partial success and a learning ground, as it enrolled tens of millions of families and paid billions of rupees in claims, demonstrating political will and implementation capacity. The coverage inadequacy at Rs 30,000, incomplete state participation and exclusion of the poorest households were the lessons that directly shaped Ayushman Bharat's design choices.

📂Confirming Old RSBY Enrolment

District health officers in most states maintain a record of former RSBY beneficiaries and can assist families whose names may have been lost in the transition to Ayushman Bharat. Families who were enrolled in RSBY but do not find their names in the Ayushman Bharat list should approach the District Collector's office or the State Health Agency to request inclusion.

Individuals who need to confirm whether their family was enrolled in RSBY between 2008 and 2018 can approach the state insurance company that administered RSBY in their state during that period. Insurance companies that ran RSBY in various states include United India Insurance, New India Assurance, ICICI Lombard and Oriental Insurance, depending on the state and the bid cycle.

RSBY ne 2008 mein pehli baar BPL parivaron ko cashless hospital treatment tak pahunch diya. Yeh sirf ek yojana nahi thi, yeh ek vyavstha ka nirman tha. Ayushman Bharat ne usi vyavstha ko aage le jakar range paanch lakh rupaye kar diya.

🏆RSBY's Legacy

The institutional legacy of RSBY extends beyond just beneficiary migration. The RSBY IT platform, biometric enrollment infrastructure, hospital empanelment methodology and claim processing architecture were all repurposed and scaled up to build the Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY system, making RSBY a foundational chapter in the history of universal health coverage in India.

The RSBY scheme, despite being superseded, represents an important milestone in India's journey toward universal health coverage. It proved that biometric smart card technology could work at population scale for a welfare scheme, demonstrated that cashless health coverage could reduce catastrophic health expenditure for poor families, and generated the institutional knowledge and IT frameworks that made Ayushman Bharat possible.

📑RSBY and Ayushman Bharat Quick Reference

❓Frequently Asked Questions