Mandira Medical Hospital in Madurai - NRI Doctors from US to Madurai

A team of non-resident Indian doctors from the US and Canada has embarked on an ambitious medical college project to ramp up medical education in India.

Christened Mandira Institute of Medical Sciences, the Rs 300-crore project will be coming up along Madurai-Rajapalayam national highway near Tirumangalam in Madurai.

The project director Dr P. Madhu, a paediatrician who has moved to Madurai from U.S., said a 300-bedded state-of-the-art multi-specialty hospital would start functioning from November next year while the medical college would be opened in August 2014.

An initiative of NRI doctors from various fields of medicine, he said nine of them from the U.S. and one from Canada, all from various fields of medicine, have joined hands to promote the project.

The uniqueness of the project is that it would be the first corporatised medical institute in the country and it would have many firsts including a Smart MD System, City of Medicine and Virtual Dissection Technology.

Dr Madhu said they were working with two U.S.-based companies to introduce advanced technology such as virtual cadaver dissection technology in medical education.

Madurai has been chosen after an exhaustive survey which revealed that there was a need both socially and market-wise.

Though Tamil Nadu fared better in medical education and health care in comparison with other states, there was still inequity within the state.

While Chennai has 13 medical colleges including 10 private institutions, Madurai has only one medical college and that too run by the government, he reasoned.

Madurai being a temple city, the name Mandira was chosen as it meant Temple in Sanskrit, he said adding that the institute would prove to be a real temple of medical learning.

Dr Madhu said 30 acres have been acquired for the project and acquisition of more lands was in progress though according to Medical Council of India 20 acres were sufficient to start a college.

He also assured that the students would not be fleeced and only the tuition and clinical training fee as per rules and regulations would be collected from them while health care would be provided at subsidised cost.

The hospital would be expanded from 300 beds to 700 beds in the next stage, Dr Madhu said.

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