AIIMS was always for Jammu: Jitendra

Tribune News Service 

Jammu, April 26

Amid the raging controversy over setting up of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Kashmir Valley, Union Minister of State in Prime Minister Office (PMO) Jitendra Singh has cleared the air on the prestigious medical insitute and questioned the state government on the location of its establishment. 

Putting the record straight by saying that “AIIMS was always meant for Jammu”, he has taken a dig at the ruling PDP and a few BJP ministers, particularly the Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh for “deliberately sending out contradictory signals” over the issue and said, “some of the state leaders take pride in owning the IIT for Jammu which was sanctioned six months ago but refuse to own the AIIMS which was sanctioned just one-and-a-half months ago.

“Right from the beginning, the demand for AIIMS is always meant for Jammu and is inspired by the realization that there is a huge regional imbalance of health care services between Kashmir and Jammu. There is an urgent need to set up an AIIMS in Jammu. It was primarily with this motivation that the Central government was approached by some of us with the demand to sanction an AIIMS for Jammu,” the union minister said while addressing a public meeting in Kathua yesterday. 

Singh said the proposal for an AIIMS was earlier also mooted during the NDA rule when Atal Behari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister and Sushma Swaraj was Union Health Minister, but the proposal was not seriously carried forward during the following 10 years of the UPA rule. Therefore, he said, the sanction of an AIIMS was, in fact, a logical culmination of the process that had got “unduly stalled”. Hence, soon after the presentation of the Union Budget on February 28 this year, he had thanked the Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for having sanctioned an AIIMS. 

On April 24, the BJP had suffered a big blow after various political, social, trade and transport called for complete shutdown in Jammu, which evoked massive response over the shifting of AIIMS to Kashmir Valley.  The BJP won 25 out of the total 37 Assembly seats of Jammu province in the last elections. Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed had announced that AIIMS would be set up in Kashmir only.

Similarly, the union minister also recalled that soon after the formation of the new government at the Centre on May 26 last year, he had approached the Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani with a requisition for IIT at Jammu. After her approval, he submitted the same proposal for financial allocation to the Union Finance Minister who was, he said, generous enough to make an announcement of IIT in Jammu in the first Budget presented by him in the month of August last year.

In the ensuing confusion, several of the other political groups and parties, which were responsible for having delayed both the IIT as well as AIIMS for Jammu, were now trying to project themselves as “holier than thou” and pleading for the cause of Jammu.  Taking a dig at the Congress and the National Conference (NC), he said, the people of Jammu needed to be made aware of the sequence of events over the last 40 years which resulted in disparity in health care delivery. The demand for AIIMS in Jammu was based on sound logic, academic reasoning and ground evidence, said Singh and added that it deserved to be viewed above political lines. 

He said those trying to fish in the troubled waters would do well to remember that the BJP and its associated organizations had been fighting for the cause of AIIMS in Jammu for the last 40 years and would not allow the “upstarts or the new starters to hijack this demand”.