PM Manmohan Singh to inaugurate ambitious hospital project for paramilitary

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will lay the foundation stone for the first-ever Research and Referral hospital on the pattern of the Army and an AIIMS like college for country's paramilitary forces next week here.

The Central Armed Police Forces Institute of Medical Sciences (CAPFIMS) is a Rs 1,368-crore project which will not only boast of a multi-speciality hospital but also a medical college, two separate institutes of nursing and paramedical, a residential campus for students and doctors, an air ambulance unit and a 24x7 mobile hospital unit for the troops of central forces like CRPF, BSF, CISF, ITBP, SSB, NSG and Assam Rifles.

This large project, which was conceptualised by the Home Ministry in 2009, will come up at a campus in Maidan Garhi in south Delhi over a period of five years and the PM will inaugurate this facility in an event on February 26.

While the R&R hospital will have 1,500 beds, spread across speciality, general and ICU wards, the AIIMS patterned medical college will offer a total of 530 seats in various streams of medicine, paramedics and nursing.

The paramilitary forces, which at present have a chain of composite hospitals spread across the country, have been facing difficulty as they do not have a dedicated medical care centre for their sick and injured on an all-India basis unlike the armed forces.

The Army's R & R hospital in the national capital is a pioneer in this domain.

Once operational, the hospital and medical college will draw strength and faculty from these forces and also through direct recruitment.

The campus will also have the facility of an air ambulance and helipad so that security personnel who are injured or sick could be flown in from an operational theatre to the CAPFIMS in a helicopter.

The Border Security Force, country's largest border guarding force, has been made the nodal authority for the development and process of this ambitious health care project of the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The CAPFIMS will get regular budgetary allocations with the first being Rs 1,368 crore.