CHENNAI: Health Minister Ma Subramanian, in a press meet on Thursday, said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s allegations that Tamil Nadu was to blame for the delay in construction of the AIIMS hospital in Madurai due to delay in land acquisition, was an outright lie.
Saying that it was not befitting of a minister holding such responsibilities to lie blatantly and asked whether Prime Minister Modi had laid the foundation stone in 2019 in a random piece of land to fool the people. Subramanian said that there was no question of delay in land acquisition on the part of Tamil Nadu since the land- all 222.47 acres of it-already belonged to the Government.
“There was no need to ‘acquire’ a Government land, it was only needed to be handed over to the Union Government which was already done in the time of ‘Edappadi’ K Palaniswami. It was on this land that Modi laid the foundation stone,” he said. Following this, JICA inspected the land and the Union Government had allocated Rs 15 crore for the construction of a compound wall which was also completed in January 2021, even before the DMK came to power, he said.
He also asked why the other six AIIMS hospitals that were announced along with the proposed Madurai AIIMS in the year 2015 were under various stages of construction or functioning whereas no work had started here. Nirmala Sitharaman had remarked that Tamil Nadu should take the blame for delay in construction of the AIIMS hospital in Madurai due to its delay in land acquisition which in turn, raised the estimated cost of construction by Rs 700 crore.