'What does AIIMS aspire to become in the year 2025?'

Over the years, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has functioned in a complex working environment with multiple and growing demands on its resources. It is called upon to educate top quality health professionals, serve as a hub of biomedical research, provide extensive hospital services and increasingly provide leadership in the area of public health. Despite the enormous challenges, the institute has established itself as the country’s pre-eminent medical institution, attracting the best and the brightest young in the country.

In meeting its onerous mandates, the institute has grown considerably – both physically and in terms of what it is doing. But can one say that the growth has been organic or faithful to a central purpose or mission? What does AIIMS aspire to become in the year 2025? What relationship should it have with the government and with its other stakeholders?

As all of you are aware, the Veliathan Committee reflected on some of these issues and produced, I believe, a very good report. I suggested to Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad last year that we should have an ambitious and befitting vision of what this great institution should aspire to become and that we should, therefore, work on a far-reaching agenda of reform. I compliment Ghulam Nabi Azad and his colleagues in the Health Ministry for the efforts they have made to improve internal governance and management of the institute.

I understand that a high-powered group is looking into changes in the statute, rules and regulations governing AIIMS that are considered critical for the institute to function effectively in an environment that nurtures innovation, talent and excellence. The government will consider the recommendations expeditiously and do what is in the best interest of the institute. We should aim at nothing less than making AIIMS one of the ten best medical universities in the world by the year 2020. This is not going to be easy. But it can be done.

In recent years, the government has adopted a more inclusive and holistic approach towards providing health security in our country, emphasising therein the importance of improved sanitation, nutrition and clean drinking water. The challenges are particularly acute in our rural areas. We have tried to address the critical lacunae of inadequate public provisioning for critical health services. The Eleventh Five Year Plan envisaged an increase in public expenditure on health to at least two per cent of GDP. This percentage was one per cent of our GDP at the start of the Eleventh Plan and has increased to only 1.1 per cent in 2009-10 according to the Mid-Term Appraisal of the Planning Commission.

There is clearly much more to do and a large effort will be required in the Twelfth Plan period to achieve the goal of taking the total allocation for the health sector to two-three per cent of our GDP. Since most of the expenditure on health is in state Budgets, the state governments will also have to substantially increase their expenditures.

In India and globally as well, there is a growing sense that medical education needs a revamp to adapt it to contemporary needs and realities. The need of the hour is to produce professionals who address health not only from the perspective of the individual patient but as part of a team integrated into the larger health system.

India needs many more health professionals, of different categories, to fill the huge shortfall in the health workforce. Many of our medical colleges are deficient in the learning resources needed to train specialists. High-quality faculty is in short supply. AIIMS, and similar institutions which are leaders in medical education, have to show the way ahead.

(Excerpts from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address at the convocation, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, in New Delhi on October 1)