Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate nine new medical colleges in Uttar Pradesh on July 30. Coming up in the districts of Deoria, Etah, Fatehpur, Ghazipur, Hardoi, Jaunpur, Mirzapur, Pratapgarh and Siddhartha Nagar, the colleges are reported to be ready and recruiting staff in order to be in operation next month.

In 2017, UP, which is the largest state in India was only said to have had 12 government medical colleges. The government since then has been adding medical colleges to different districts in the state in various phases. This year, the centre had approved 27 medical colleges to be established under the centrally sponsored scheme for the "establishment of new medical colleges attached with existing/referral district hospitals."

According to the National Medical Commission, UP currently has 57 medical colleges of which 29 are government-run. This is an increase of 142 per cent since 2017. It recently surpassed Karnataka as the state with maximum government colleges. The Yogi government has planned to open medical colleges on the Public-Private-Partnership model in 16 districts of the state that do not have a medical college until now.

The state government says that it is preparing to make Uttar Pradesh a hub of medical education, a move which has seen a great push due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent devastation caused by the second wave of the pandemic in India. Uttar Pradesh already has four premier medical institutes, namely Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGIMS), Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences, Uttar Pradesh University of Medical Sciences and King George's Medical University (KGMU).

(With IANS Inputs)