The first of the seven proposed Indian Institutes of Public Health (IIPH) in Hyderabad will commence its training programme by July 2008. It took just a year to translate the concept into reality since Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had inaugurated the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), the key sponsor of these institutes, in March last year. | |
| The foundation stone for the institute was unveiled recently by Union health minister Anbumani Ramadoss. |
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| Highlighting the speedy take off of the Hyderabad project, to which the Andhra Pradesh government had provided 45 acres of land near the upcoming international airport free of cost besides Rs 30 crore to the corpus, the minister said while Andhra was quite proactive in implementing such schemes initiated by his ministry, in other states they remained in the 'pipeline' for over two years. |
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| Besides Andhra, the other states where the institute would come up include Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. The foundation has tied up with reputed institutes, including Harvard School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins University to establish the IIPHs. |
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| The institute at Hyderabad is being set up at a cost of Rs 120 crore of which the PHFI is providing Rs 60 crore for the project. The remaining Rs 30 crore is being contributed by corporate bigwigs like Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Computers, GV Krishna Reddy of GVK Group, GV Prasad, managing director of Dr Reddy's Labs, N Prasad, founder of Matrix Laboratories, and Srini Raju of iLabs. |
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| Aimed at developing human resource capacities in the area of public health, both for government and private sectors, IIPH has been termed by the Union minister as a major initiative in the ongoing efforts of strengthening public health infrastructure across the country. Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said health had been a critical area of the government's development policy. |
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| According to K Srinath Reddy, president of PHFI and former head of the department of cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the institute will conduct two-year courses in public health management besides one-year diploma courses. |
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| About 150 students in the two-year courses and another 800 students in short and medium-term courses will be trained by the institute every year, he said. The institute would also introduce bachelor's degree (BSc) in public health in future. |
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| According to Ramadoss, the Centre would introduce one-year compulsory rural posting for medical graduates after their internship from next year. |
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| He also said that massive plans were drawn to strengthen pupil health facilities under the Rural Health Mission besides launching trauma care facilities along the Golden Quadrilateral highway soon. The minister also launched a website on the practices of healthy living (www.healthy.india.org) on the occasion of World Health Day. |
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| Rajat K Gupta, chairman of the governing board of PHFI, too complimented the state government for its proactive support to the ongoing initiative. |
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