The West Bengal government will hand over a hospital near Kolkata to Chennai-based Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd for the state’s second private medical college and Apollo’s first in the country.
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, flanked by Apollo Hospitals chairman Prathap C Reddy, said the college would come up on the premises of the 131-bed Sagar Dutta State General Hospital at Kamarhati municipality.
“We have identified the location in Kamarhati Municipality and I have engaged the local MLA to find out the required land,” Bhattacharjee said.
The hospital is located on a 23-acre plot, but a teaching hospital will need at least 25 acres under the rules of the Medical Council of India.
Earlier, the state had handed over an almost defunct TB hospital in Jadavpur to a private party, which has set up the KPC Medical College & Hospital.
The state has nine government medical colleges that turn out a total of 1105 MBBS graduates every year.
The Apollo Gleneagles Medical College, expected to be operational in 2009, aims to produce 150 students at the undergraduate level. It will be run by Apollo and Parkway Health, its Singapore-based partner in the Apollo Gleneagles Hospital here.
Under the MCI rules, Apollo will have to increase the number of beds to at least 750 if it wants a student batch of 150.
The hospital would continue to offer 131 free beds, apart from some highly subsidised teaching beds.
“It would also have almost 200 charging beds but the charges would be 60% of what is in the Apollo Gleneagles hospital,” Reddy said.
Suneeta Reddy, the group’s executive director for finance, said “The Chief minister has reduced the capital intensity of the public-private-partnership project by giving us the land and an institution that is already running.”
