With Rs.1,100 crore, AIIMS bags highest budget share

New Delhi -  With Rs.1,124 crore, the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the national capital tops the list of hospitals and research institutes with the maximum budgetary allocation.

India's health allocation has been hiked by 14 percent with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announcing Rs.30,702 crore for the sector with special focus on cheaper life saving drugs and better health facilities for the rural and urban poor.

Of the medical institutes, AIIMS got a major chunk, up from last fiscal's Rs.1,022 crore.

The Delhi-based institute is among the top 10 medical colleges in the world, catering to almost 8,000 patients, mostly from the underprivileged section, every day. It has over 2,200 beds.

Safdarjung Hospital, in the heart of Delhi, was allocated Rs.467 crore, up from Rs.345 crore.

The Delhi-based Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital will get Rs. 322 crore as compared to Rs.283 crore in the last fiscal. The Lady Hardinge Medical College has been allocated Rs. 223 crore as against Rs. 194 crore in the previous year.

The Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh has been allotted Rs.546 crore as against Rs.470 crore.

The Kalawati Saran hospital in the national capital, which caters specifically to children, has got Rs.61 crore as against Rs.56 crore last year.

The government also allocated a huge chunk of the health budget on setting up the eight AIIMS-like institutes in the country.

A total of Rs.1,544.21 crore has been earmarked for setting up the super speciality medical centres as compared to Rs.1,616 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 (Odisha), Jodhpur (Rajasthan) and Rishikesh (Uttarakhand).

In the second phase, two 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.