MUMBAI: ICICI Bank on Friday committed Rs 1,200 crore to help the Tata Memorial Centre (TMC) to expand its cancer treating facilities.
As part of the commitment from the ICICI Foundation, three new facilities will be built in Navi Mumbai's Kharghar on the outskirts of the financial capital, Mullanpur in Punjab and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.
Girish Chandra Chaturvedi, the chairman of the second largest private sector lender, said the three facilities will be fully functional by 2027 and will enable the Tata Memorial Centre to handle 25,000 more cancer patients per year.
"As part of our commitment towards promoting healthcare, this initiative will enhance comprehensive cancer care services in different regions of our country by providing patients access to advanced and latest cancer therapies," he said.
Chaturvedi said right now, the bank has Rs 500 crore of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) corpus ready for the three facilities, and will be adding to the corpus as the years go.
"This is a step towards resolving a problem which we are foreseeing to aggravate, especially as urbanisation increases," he told reporters at TMC's flagship hospital after signing three Memorandums of Understanding for the centre.
The bank feels by the end of the spending cycle, the overall CSR corpus will be Rs 2,500 crore, which means the bank will be spending 50 percent of its overall money on this partnership, Chaturvedi said.
He added that at present, the bank spends about 25 per cent of its CSR budget on healthcare which may go up or down depending on the need.