Hyderabad: Lok Sabha Congress MP, N Uttam Kumar Reddy on Friday said that the construction of All India Institute Of Medical Science (AIIMS) Bibinagar has been delayed indefinitely by the Central Government with a lack of transparency.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare answered MP Uttam Kumar’s question in Lok Sabha regarding the long-pending AIIMS Bibinagar project and said that the tender has been awarded but did not provide any timeline for the completion of the project.
“A long-standing public demand of Telangana State has been delayed indefinitely by the Central Government and moreover with a shameful lack of transparency, no reliable information has been provided. Instead, the Government has revised information provided by themselves repeatedly, and have not furnished a single reason for the continuous delays,” said the Nalgonda MP.
The Telangana MP had raised a similar question on September 18, 2020, in the Lok Sabha and the Union health ministry informed the House that the timeline for completion of AIIMS Bibinagar is September 2022.
In February 2022, the Ministry informed that the date of completion has been pushed to November 2023 and subsequently in July 2022 when MP Uttam Kumar asked for a timeline of completion, the Ministry stated that the project will be completed by January 2025.
On Friday, in reply to the MP’s question, the Union health ministry only replied that the tender for the construction of AIIMS Bibinagar has been awarded in July 2022 but did not specify any timeline of completion.
Section 93 of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act required the Central Government to complete certain guarantees within 1O years, and AIIMS Bibinagar was one of them. The Government revealed in the Lok Sabha on July 22, 2022, that out of Rs 1028 crore sanctioned for AIIMS Bibinagar only Rs 29.28 crore has been released so far.
The MP alleged that the Union government has displayed startling inconsistency in providing information about the status of AIIMS Bibinagar. The medical institution is a part of developmental guarantees and has been delayed for a very long time.
