KASARAGOD: The Tata Group handed over the 551-bed COVID hospital built at a cost of Rs 60 crore at Thekkil village in Kasaragod to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday.
The 81,000 sq ft-hospital spread over 5.5 acres was built in five months using prefabricated shipping containers. This is said to be India's first hospital built from scratch to exclusively treat COVID patients.
Tata Projects deputy general manager Gopinath Reddy handed over the key of the hospital to district collector D Sajith Babu.
Attending the function via a video call, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan thanked the Tata Group and Tata Trusts chairman Ratan Tata for building the hospital in record five months.
On March 28, Ratan Tata tweeted pledging Rs 500 crore to buy personal protective equipment, respiratory systems, testing kids, setting up modular treatment facilities for infected patients and knowledge management and training of health workers and the public.
"The COVID 19 crisis is one of the toughest challenges we will face as a race. The Tata Trusts and the Tata group companies have in the past risen to the needs of the nation. At this moment, the need of the hour is greater than any other time," Tata had said then.
Soon after, the Tata Group and Tata Trusts Executive got in touch with the Kerala government. "We proposed that a hospital should come up in Kasaragod and the group accepted it," said the Chief Minister.
On April 9, the Chief Minister announced that the Tata Group would build a COVID hospital in Kasaragod. In exactly five months, the group handed over the hospital to the state government.
The Chief Minister appreciated and thanked the Tata Group for its 'business ethics' and social commitment. "Knowingly or unknowingly, every Indian uses Tata products, which range from salt to software. But we should know that the group is renowned not because it has many companies and a thousand products but because it adheres to higher business ethics," Vijayan said.
The Tata Group was the first business house to engage in social activities, other companies emulated it and later the country made corporate social responsibility a law, he said.
The COVID hospital will be an asset to Kerala's health care sector and to Kasaragod, where there is no tertiary health care facility, the Chief Minister said.
The infrastructure
The hospital was built using 128 customised shipping containers measuring 40-ft length by 10-ft height by 10-ft width.
The hospital is divided into three zones: Zones 1 and 3 are quarantine facilities and Zone 2 is an isolation facility.
A container -- if it is an isolation ward -- will have three independent rooms with attached bathrooms. For quarantine wards, each container would have five beds with an attached bathroom. All the containers come with AC, provided by the Tata Group.
The hospital also has a canteen and rooms for doctors and nurses. The exhaust air from each room is treated before being let out. "These containers are light but strong," the Chief Minister said.
The hospital also has 63 biodigesters and eight overflow tanks for processing toilet waste to gas. An overhead water tank with a capacity of 1.25 lakh litres has also been built.
Cost-effective project
The Chief Minister announced the project on April 6 and the earthwork on the rocky terrain started on April 9, said collector D Sajith Babu. The Earth-moving Equipment Owners' Association did the work free of cost. "We had a budget of Rs 1.48 crore, but we provided only the fuel worth Rs 33 lakh and the work was done by the association," he said.
On May 15, the first prefabricated containers arrived, he said.
The containers were built at Faridabad, Howrah, Mangaluru, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, said an executive of the Tata Group. "We had to get special permissions from all the five district administrations because the lockdown was in place then," he said.
The collector said a 700-metre approach road was built to connect the hospital to the national highway.
The project is a good example of private participation for the public good, said the Chief Minister, while dedicating the hospital to the nation.