During the concluding phase of its five-year term in office, the pervious UPA Government had made very ambitious announcement of establishing five new Medical Colleges in the State with three of them in Jammu region — Kathua, Doda and Rajouri — and two in Kashmir at Anantnag and Baramulla. Authorities took this decision in view of great pressure on existing Medical Colleges in Kashmir and Jammu provinces. A Medical College is allowed a definite number of seats as per the criterion of the Medical Council of India. Every year we have meritorious students who qualify for admission in Medical Colleges. Owing to restricted number of new admissions, many meritorious students are unable to get admission in any Medical College in the State or outside the State on nomination because all Medical Colleges have limited number of seats to which admission is based on merit and through selection.
This process excludes many meritorious students from finding admission in professional colleges. It ends up with waste of rare talent and the loss is of the society. It was the considered opinion of the Government that rare and precious human resource should not go waste. Therefore, policy planners concluded that saving the talent from going waste and providing medical facility to people in remote and far-flung areas of the State necessitated establishing of more Medical Colleges at district headquarters rather than concentrating them in the twin capital cities. This was a laudable decision and people in the State were happy to know that a big change was on the anvil about providing the facility of medical support to them.
The UPA Government did nothing beyond making the announcement and raising the expectations of the people. Perhaps they did not get time to pursue the matter once announcement of establishing the colleges was made. Soon after assuming the reins of the Government, PDP-BJP coalition Government took up the matter for consideration. The first step is of acquiring land for the Colleges. If the land is of private owners, its acquiring is a bit tedious and time-consuming affair. However, if it is Government land meaning the property of any administrative department of the Government, its acquisition is simpler. The Health and Medical Education Department is facing some difficulty in acquiring land in two districts of Kathua and Doda because most of the identified land is private. Acquiring private land is a lengthy process beginning with formal notification and inviting objections. It can take long time to finalize acquisition, transfer of land, and make formal entries in revenue records. In other three districts, where land for these colleges is already identified, much of acquisition process has been completed.
Land acquisition is important and a pre-requisite for approaching the Union Ministry of Health for release of grants. It appears that not all five proposed Medical Colleges would be taken up in one bloc for release of grant because those for which acquisition of land is supposed to take a long time may be taken up only after that process is complete. Whereas in the case of rest three colleges, their cases could be taken up as soon as land acquisition is completed.
We would very much like that the Revenue Department takes expeditious steps of acquiring the land for proposed colleges and hands it over to the Health and Medical Education Department so that grants are obtained and work on their construction is started.
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