New Delhi, Feb 28 (IANS) The prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the national capital tops the list of hospitals and research institutes to get the maximum allocation of Rs. 1,340 crore in the budget for 2013-14.
India's health budget has been hiked by 28 percent with Finance Minister P. Chidambaram allocating Rs.37,330 crore (Rs. $6962 million), with a special focus on medical education, training and research.
Chidambaram said the focus of the government was "health for all".
Of the medical institutes, AIIMS got a major chunk, up from last fiscal's Rs.1,284 crore. In 2011-12, it was Rs.1,062 crore.
The Delhi-based institute is among India's top medical colleges, with its hospital daily catering to almost 8,000 patients, mostly from the underprivileged sections. It has over 2,200 beds.
Safdarjung Hospital, adjacent to AIIMS, has been allocated Rs.565 crore, up from Rs.451.75 crore.
The Delhi-based Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital will get Rs. 403 crore as compared to Rs.335 crore in the last fiscal. The Lady Hardinge Medical College has been allocated Rs. 329 crore as against Rs. 191 crore in the previous year.
The Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh has been allotted Rs.635 crore as against Rs.540 crore.
The Kalawati Saran hospital in the national capital, which caters specifically to children, has got Rs.72 crore as against Rs.60 crore last year.
The government also allocated a huge chunk of the health budget on setting up eight AIIMS-like institutes in the country.
A total of Rs.1975 crore has been earmarked for setting up the super speciality medical centres as compared to Rs.1010 crore last year.
The institutes 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 have been established at 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.
Chidambaram said the six AIIMS-like institutes had admitted their first batch of students in the academic session that commenced September 2012.
The hospitals attached to the colleges will be functional in 2013-14.
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