HYDERABAD: The Health Ministry told the Lok Sabha on Friday that Telangana has not submitted any proposal seeking new medical colleges under a Centrally-sponsored scheme. The Health Ministry’s statement was in response to a question by MP N Uttam Kumar Reddy.
The Ministry stated that under the Centrally-sponsored scheme “Establishment of new medical colleges attached with existing district / referral hospital”, the State government had not submitted any proposal for consideration. This scheme was currently in its third Phase and 75 new medical colleges have been allocated across the country so far, but none for Telangana.
Currently there are only 35 medical colleges, both private and government, in Telangana with a total of 5,240 MBBS seats and 2,337 PG seats. To the query of Uttam Kumar Reddy as to when the AIIMS-Bibinagar with become a super specialty hospital, the Ministry said that AIIMS, approved at cost of `1,028 crore, has a project completion deadline of 2024 and till now, only `28.16 crore has been released.
Currently, there are two batches of students in the college — 2019 and 2020 — with 112 students and another 100 will be taken in the 2021 batch, for which counselling is delayed.