Railway drops Mamata Banerjee's medical college project

NEW DELHI: Former Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee's ambitious proposal of setting up medical colleges across the country has been dropped, Lok Sabha was told today.

Banerjee had announced in the 2009-10 Rail Budget setting up of medical colleges attached to existing railway hospitals through PPP mode to give higher education facilities to children of railway personnel at 18 locations.

The identified locations were Barasat, Kharagpur, Garden Reach, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bilaspur, Lucknow, Bhubaneswar, Mysore, Guwahati, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Jodhpur, Dibrugarh, Bhopal, Jammu and Trivandrum.

"As per Medical Council of India rules, PPP medical colleges with Government (Railway) Hospital is not permitted. This Ministry has therefore dropped the proposal of setting up of medical colleges," Minister of State for Railway Manoj Sinha said in a written reply.

After the budget announcement, RITES, a railways subsidiary, was awarded the work at an estimated cost of Rs 187 lakh besides service tax for consultancy and preparing bid documents for selection of a private partner to implement the project.

RITES had submitted the preliminary reports of feasibility studies of Chennai, Secunderabad and Kharagpur. RITES had been paid Rs 29.41 lakh.