All ESIC hospitals with 200 beds to be medical colleges: Labour minister
New Delhi: Union labour minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Saturday said the Centre would upgrade all hospitals of the Employees' State Insurance Corporations (ESIC) with 200 beds or more into full-fledged medical colleges, part of an ongoing expansion drive.
The government also proposes to reserve 40% of seats in these medical colleges for wards of employees with ESIC's health insurance cover, the minister said, inaugurating a 30-bed facility at Kala Amb in Himachal Pradesh.
The state-backed ESIC, which provides free, no-cash-ceiling healthcare to enrolled workers across the country, is in the process of setting up medical colleges in Mumbai's Andheri, Delhi's Basaidarapur, Guwahati, Indore, Jaipur, Ludhiana, Naroda-Bapunagar in Gujarat, Noida and Varanasi.
'Forty per cent of seats in these institutions will be reserved for the wards of insured persons, ensuring greater educational opportunities for workers' families,' Mandaviya said.
The ESIC, set up under the Employees' State Insurance Act 1948, covers all formal-sector workers with a monthly salary of ₹21,000 or less.
The ESIC currently runs 165 hospitals countrywide, including medical colleges, and a chain of 1,574 dispensaries, but these aren't sufficient to cover workers in all districts of the country.
Under an expansion drive, the ESIC's coverage was recently extended to 15 additional districts, following which the organisation now covers 689 districts in the country, of which 586 are fully covered, HT had reported on April 1.
India's public spending on health, although on an increasing trend, is still below the national target of 2.5% of gross domestic product or GDP and stands at about 1.9%, according to the government's Economy Survey 2024-25.
Built at a cost of around ₹100 crore, the Kala Amb 30-bed facility is estimated to benefit over 100,000 beneficiaries with healthcare services for residents of Sirmaur and neighbouring districts in major specialties such as general medicine, surgery, gynaecology and orthopaedics etc.
Last month, the minister had inaugurated the ESIC's 200-bed multi-specialty hospital in Ranchi, which will serve a key industrial belt, part of a plan to build 20 such facilities to strengthen and expand social security for nearly 30.72 million eligible beneficiaries.
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