Madurai/Ramanathapuram: Around 1.40 pm Tuesday, a group of students wearing the trademark white doctor’s coats intently observed a cadaver at a government medical college located two hours from Madurai.
These 50 students form the cream of India’s medical student fraternity — and the name stitched on their coats explained why.
They are the maiden batch of Tamil Nadu’s first All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
AIIMS Madurai — whose construction has yet to begin 3 years after PM Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the project — is meant to be housed in a sprawling campus at the city’s Thoppur area.
But escalating costs — blamed on pandemic-related delays — have pushed the construction deadline from an initial stipulated date within 45 months to October 2026.
Of the 11 new AIIMS announced along with AIIMS Madurai between 2014 and 2018, at least four — Rajkot, Jammu, Jharkhand, and Guwahati — are also currently operating out of temporary campuses.
Work completion ranges between 20 and 70 per cent, the Union health ministry said in the Lok Sabha in February this year.
When ThePrint visited the Madurai site, it saw tall compound walls with barbed wires cordoning off the barren land allocated for the AIIMS campus. Half a kilometre away, in an adjacent property, three men were surveying a piece of land.
“Work has just begun to extend the Austinpatti Hospital,” said one of the workers, who did not wish to be named, about the local government hospital. “As for AIIMS, I have not seen anything more than a compound wall so far. They said something about constructing a small building but even that has not happened. They say it is a ‘funding’ issue.”
AIIMS Madurai executive director Dr M. Hanumantha Rao told ThePrint that delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have led to cost escalations, but expressed optimism.
“Now, the revised estimates have been sent to the Department of Expenditure for approval. Once cleared, the tender will be floated and work can commence in six months,” he said.
When the PM laid the foundation stone in 2019, the project cost was estimated to be Rs 1,264 crore, which had reportedly climbed to Rs 2,000 crore by December 2020.
In March 2021, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) — a government agency tasked with aid — extended assistance to the tune of Rs 1,627 crore, citing the project objective of enhancing “access of high-end medical services to the marginalised and excluded”.
The Union health ministry noted in Lok Sabha in February 2022 that pre-investment work has been substantially completed, and the loan agreement signed between the governments of India and Japan. The process to engage a project management consultant is underway, it added.
While the proposed Madurai facility has yet to open doors to patients, and offer the specialised medical care that the AIIMS brand is known for, the institute welcomed students at an alternative facility this April.
The first batch of students — comprising 49 from outside Tamil Nadu and one from Madurai — shares space with students of the Government Ramanathapuram Medical College (GRMC).
The fifth floor of the GRMC building — set up with air conditioners, chairs, and equipment stamped with ‘AIIMS MDU’ — will serve as the temporary teaching campus for the AIIMS students for two years.
A student described their current situation — studying at a temporary campus — as “not ideal”, but added that “the faculty are really helping us settle in”.
Madurai MP Su. Venkatesan, who has been routinely raising the topic in Parliament, asking for the status of the project, said he was “very happy” to see at least the medical course having started on a temporary campus.
“For two years I have been watching the progress, with the AIIMS Madurai coming up, southern Tamil Nadu will have a good medical hub,” he told ThePrint.
Also read: China, Russia & North Korea hackers target AIIMS, SII, Patanjali for Covid data — report
Eye on future
Dr Rao told ThePrint that the Puducherry-based Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) had been designated the mentor institute for AIIMS Madurai.
Added Dr. P. Vijaya, who is in charge of administrative issues on campus, “We are already in the process of recruiting faculty. Before the first year is complete, we would have hired more faculty members.”
For now, only 8 out of the 183 faculty positions for AIIMS Madurai have been filled, according to a Union health ministry reply in the Lok Sabha in July. These faculty members teach the first-year syllabi of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and community medicine.
According to Vijaya, authorities at the GRMC have “supported” them well.
“We even share the anatomy lab by dividing it up. The GRMC students use it in the morning, we use it after lunch so we can both teach without any issues,” she said.
The infrastructure set aside for AIIMS Madurai students includes lecture halls, smart classrooms — where faculty can zoom into bones, for instance, using a document camera while teaching — and a yet-to-be-set-up lab for first-year students.
The students also have online sessions with the faculty at AIIMS Mangalagiri, which Madurai teachers said was also a mentor institution.
A professor at GRMC said “though the syllabus is the same, there is a difference between their students and ours”.
“AIIMS, in general, focuses a lot more on research work and has better funding too compared to state government colleges,” the professor added.
Of the 50 students at AIIMS Madurai — 33 men and 17 women — 49 don’t speak Tamil. They are from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Haryana, Maharashtra, and some southern states, said Dr Vijaya.
“We have taken them to interact with young children at orphanages and to small community-level rehabilitation centres to help them get acquainted with the region and to develop a connection with people, which is important going forward,” she added.
Outside her office, a notice board displays the names of the students, some of them for not having full attendance in July.
“From next year, they will have to start interacting with patients and attendants, so we have started spoken Tamil classes for an hour on Saturdays,” Vijaya said.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
Also read: Lack of senior doctors, only 3-5% hospital beds: NITI Aayog finds big gaps in emergency care