New Delhi, January 12:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate as many as 11 new government medical colleges, and the new campus of the Central Institute of Classical Tamil (CICT) in Tamil Nadu today. The medical colleges will be inaugurated across the southern state while the new campus of the central institute will be opened in the capital city Chennai. The inauguration event will be held at 4pm via video conferencing, according to a statement by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).
Taking to Twitter on Tuesday, PM Modi stated that the new medical colleges will “augment health infrastructure and ensure affordable healthcare to the people of Tamil Nadu.”
The colleges have been constructed at an estimated cost of nearly ₹4,000 crore, of which around ₹2,415 crore has been given by the Union government whereas the remaining amount has been provided by the state. The 11 districts where the medical institutes have been set up are the Nilgiris, Thiruvallur, Nagapattinam, Namakkal, Dindigul, Kallakurichi, Ariyalur, Ramanathapuram, Krishnagiri, Tiruppur and Virudhunagar. There will be a cumulative capacity of 1,450 seats in the 11 new medical colleges.
The institutes have been established under the Centre’s ‘Establishing of New Medical Colleges attached with existing district/referral hospital’ scheme. Under this, medical colleges are set up in districts that lack either a government or a private medical college.
Meanwhile, the new campus of CICT has been fully-funded by the Central government and built at a cost of ₹24 crore. It has three-storeys and is equipped with a spacious library, seminar halls, a multimedia hall and an e-library.
According to a statement by PMO, the new campus has been constructed in sync with PM Modi’s “vision to protect and preserve Indian heritage and promote classical languages.”
Throwing some light on how CICT functions, the statement further stated that it promotes classical Tamil by doing research activities in order to establish the “ancientness and uniqueness of Tamil language.” The institute has a huge collection of more than 45,000 ancient Tamil books and it also offers its students a fellowship, among others.
“The new campus will provide an efficient working environment for the institute in its pursuit of promoting classical Tamil across the world,” the PMO statement added.
The CICT has so far been working from a rented building.
