Country Needs at Least 600 Medical Colleges, 50 AIIMS-like Institutions, Says Gadkari : Education News

The country needs at least 600 medical colleges, 50 AIIMS-like institutions and 200 super-specialty hospitals, Union minister Nitin Gadkari said on Saturday as he called for the need to replicate the infrastructure development sector’s public-private partnership model in the health care and education sectors. The Road Transport and Highways Minister was speaking at the felicitation of COVID-19 warriors in Karad city of Maharashtra’s Satara district.

He said the cooperative sector should also come forward to set up medical facilities. “Once during a discussion with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, I told him about the scarcity of ventilators. He asked me how many ventilators were there in the country, to which I replied there must be around 2.5 lakh. But he told me that there were only 13,000 ventilators when the coronavirus pandemic broke out in the country,” Gadkari said.

There was a lack of oxygen, beds, and other medical facilities at that time. But doctors, paramedical, nurses helped a lot in those times, he said, adding, ”I appreciate their work.” Apart from the government-run hospitals, the contribution of medical facilities set up by the cooperative and private sectors was commendable, the minister said.