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AIIMS Madurai construction starts 5 years after foundation
DMK has criticised the union government of starting the work after a delay of five years only due to the ensuing Lok Sabha elections
Chennai: Construction work for the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Tamil Nadu’s Madurai began on Tuesday, almost five years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone in 2019.
The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led union government of starting the work after a delay of five years only due to the ensuing Lok Sabha elections just like the foundation stone was laid in January 2014 ahead of the parliamentary elections held that year.
The AIIMS in Madurai has been an election issue, particularly in the 2021 assembly elections when the DMK drove home the point that non-BJP ruled states were not given Central funds.
Larsen & Toubro began the construction work.
“The construction of AIIMS has begun today (Tuesday) without much fanfare as if it is a secret project,” Madurai MP Su Venkatesan said.
“The Prime Minister was in Madurai last week, and they (Union Government) could have asked him to launch the work. The nation would have known that there was a gap of five years between laying the foundation stone and the start of the actual construction work,” Venkatesan added.
Until now, the medical college of AIIMS in Madurai has been functioning temporarily from the Ramanathapuram Government Medical College. The Union government had appointed Dr M Hanumantha Rao and Dr Prashant Lavania as the executive director and president of the institute.
The Union government announced the setting up of the institute in the 2015-16 Union budget.
Inside the Parliament too, Tamil Nadu’s MPs from Madurai and Virudhunagar— Venkatesan, and Manickam Tagore have been raising the issue of the delay.
Chief minister and DMK president MK Stalin has been criticising the BJP on the matter for years in several of his speeches.
In comparison, he has often said, the DMK-led state government has established a multi-speciality hospital in Chennai within two years of announcing the project.
Ahead of the 2021 elections, his son Udhayanidhi Stalin carried a red brick with “AIIMS” written on it during the election campaign to chide the BJP.
“Only a brick was present where an entire hospital should have been built,” Udhayanidhi said, adding that such was BJP’s development politics.
The hospital will be spread over 108,325 square metres with 870 beds, Emergency block, an Ayush block, teaching block, an auditorium with a seating capacity of 750, conference halls, separate hostels for girls and boys, service block, and residential complexes for professors and other staff will be built in the AIIMS.
It is pegged to be constructed at a cost of ₹1,978 crore with funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) at Thoppur which is about 13 km from Madurai.
