Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate 11 new government medical colleges across Tamil Nadu and the new campus of Central Institute of Classical Tamil (CICT) in Chennai on January 12 via video conferencing. The new medical colleges are being established at an estimated cost of about Rs 4,000 crore, of which around Rs 2,145 crore has been provided by the Union government and the rest is borne by the Tamil Nadu government, the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement.

The districts where the new medical colleges are being established are Virudhunagar, Namakkal, Nilgiris, Tiruppur, Thiruvallur, Nagapattinam, Dindigul, Kallakurichi, Ariyalur, Ramanathapuram and Krishnagiri. The new medical colleges will have a cumulative capacity of 1,450 seats. The move is in line with the Centre's scheme of 'Establishing of New Medical Colleges attached with existing district/referral hospitals'. Under the scheme, medical colleges are established in districts, which do not already have a government or private medical college, the statement said.

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The Union government has borne the total expenditure of Rs 24 crore for the new campus of CICT, the PMO said. The institute was operating in a rented building so far, the new plan proposes a three-storey campus with a spacious library, seminar halls and a multimedia hall. An autonomous organisation under the Union Ministry of Education, CICT is contributing to the promotion of classical Tamil by doing research activities so as to establish the ancientness and uniqueness of the Tamil language, it said. The PMO statement claimed that it aims to translate and publish 'Thirukkural', a classic Tamil language text, in various Indian as well as 100 foreign languages.