Education and health, widely accepted as mutually reinforcing by social scientists, were grossly neglected during the 34-year uninterrupted rule of the CPM-led Left Front government (1977-2011) in West Bengal, running the then most industrially and academically advanced state of the Indian Union into the ground and prompting a steady flight of capital and professionals.

Unfortunately incumbent chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress, which routed the CPM-led Left Front alliance in the assembly election of 2011, haven’t succeeded in making good their election promises to revamp these sectors either.

Against this dismal backdrop, the Central government’s announcement on October 7 of the establishment of three All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) modeled on the Delhi-based AIIMS, which is routinely voted India’s #1 medical college-cum-teaching hospital, in Nagpur (Maharashtra), Manglagiri (Andhra Pradesh) and Kalyani (West Bengal), has enthused monitors of West Bengal’s medical education scene. Currently there are only 17 medical colleges in West Bengal (pop. 91 million), including 13 promoted and managed by the state government, one run by the West Bengal University of Health Sciences and three private medical colleges with an aggregate enrolment of a mere 2,450 students. Therefore news of a new AIIMS in Kalyani, 50 km from Kolkata, has been widely welcomed by academics and the medical fraternity in the state.

“The new AIIMS will be established as institutes of national importance for providing quality medical education, nursing education and also to provide tertiary healthcare facilities to the people of these locations,” said Union power, coal and new and renewable energy minister Piyush Goyal after West Bengal’s first AIIMS project, to be constructed at a cost of Rs.1,754 crore, was cleared by the Union cabinet on October 23.

AIIMS, Kalyani will undoubtedly “augment the facilities of quality medical education and will also address the shortfall of healthcare professionals” in West Bengal as promised by Goyal, because the scale of the project is unprecedented in the medical education history of the state. The proposed AIIMS will be a full-fledged medical college equipped with a 960-bed teaching hospital, an auditorium, nursing college, night shelter, hostels and residential facilities for doctors and employees. It will also have separate blocks for teaching ayurveda, siddha, homeopathy and unani — traditional medical education systems.

Unsurprisingly, medical practitioners and professionals are jubilant about this project proposal being cleared (and funded) by the Centre. “Private hospitals don’t cater to the general public. Therefore the high-quality medical care offered by the teaching hospital of the new AIIMS will be a huge benefit for students and the lay public,” says Dr. Suvro Banerjee, senior consultant and interventional cardiologist at the Apollo Gleneagles Heart Institute, Kolkata. However, Dr. Banerjee expresses apprehension about the “small town of Kalyani” attracting top-grade faculty.

But Dr. Bhabatosh Biswas, vice chancellor of the West Bengal University of Health Sciences, believes West Bengal’s first AIIMS will prompt the development of Kalyani into an education hub on the lines of Vellore in Tamil Nadu. “The new AIIMS will sharply upgrade the quality of medical education being dispensed in West Bengal and give a big boost to the study of paramedical sciences, besides generating employment in the upstream construction and medical equipment industries and downstream businesses. This is a welcome and overdue development,” says Biswas.

Now with this ambitious project given official clearance, West Bengal’s medical and academic fraternities are keeping their fingers crossed that it won’t suffer the implementation delays for which the state has acquired a notorious reputation.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)