New Delhi, Feb 28 (IANS) The prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Monday got a budgetary hike, with Rs.1,022 crore earmarked in the union budget for the institute that caters to almost 8,000 patients every day.
India’s health allocation has been hiked by 20 percent with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announcing Rs.26,760 crore (Rs.26.7 billion/$5.9 billion) for the sector with special focus on research, insurance cover for marginal workers and medical education.
Of the medical institutes, AIIMS got a major chunk, up from last fiscal’s Rs.985 crore.
The Delhi-based institute is among the top 10 medical colleges in the world, and caters mostly to the underprivileged people who come from all over the country. It has over 2,200 beds. The Newsweek magazine has described it as an ‘oasis of the poor’.
The Safdarjung Hospital, in the heart of Delhi, was allocated Rs.345 crore as against Rs.330 crore in the last fiscal.
The Delhi-based Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital will get Rs.283 crore as compared to Rs.257 crore in the last fiscal. The Lady Hardinge Medical College has been allocated Rs.194 crore as against Rs.174 crore in the previous year.
The Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh has been allotted Rs.470 crore as against Rs.407 crore in the last fiscal.
The Kalawati Saran hospital, which caters specifically to children, has got Rs.56 crore in budget funds as against Rs.53 crore last year.
The government also allocated a huge chunk of the health budget on setting up the six AIIMS-like institutes in the country. A total of Rs.1,616 crore has been earmarked for setting up the super speciality medical centres as compared to Rs.747 crore last year.
The institutes on the lines of AIIMS are being constructed under the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana. These institutes will be established in two phases. In the first phase, six such centres will be established in Patna (Bihar), Raipur (Chhattisgarh), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), Bhubaneswar (Orissa), Jodhpur (Rajasthan) and Rishikesh (Uttarakhand).
In the second phase, two more such institutes will come up in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
The aim behind setting up these institutes was to correct the regional imbalance in the availability of affordable and reliable healthcare services to the rural and poor populace.
Each hospital will have 960 beds and will provide undergraduate medical education to 100 students per year. Postgraduate and postdoctoral courses will also be offered.
