SAC sanctions Rs 87 crore to expedite work on AIIMS in Awantipora, Vijaypur

Srinagar: The state administrative council has sanctioned Rs 87 crore for removing hurdles in the way of building two All India Institutes of Medical Sciences in Jammu and Kashmir.

The two AIIMS are being set up at Awantipora in Kashmir and Vijaypur in the Jammu province under the Prime Minister’s developmental package for the state.

The state government has undertaken to ensure hassle-free access to both sites by paying for land acquisition for development of roadway or for any other purpose for realising the premier medical institutes.

However, land acquisition and removal of other bottlenecks has been a main hurdle for the last two years, hampering work on both the projects.

“The state government has now sanctioned Rs 87 crore to meet its obligation for acquisition of land,” said a senior finance department official, adding that a provision for the funds has been made in the state budget for 2019-20.

According to a health department official, 1886 kanals and 5 marals (235.75 acres) at Awantipora and 1954 kanals and 6 marlas (244.25 acres) at Vijaypur stand transferred and handed over to the central public works department which is the executing agency for these projects.

The CPWD has taken up construction of boundary wall around the AIIMS site in Awantipora, but lack of an access road is severely hampering the work.

Similarly in Jammu, delay in clearing a construction site for the AIIMS had been hampering its construction.

Now, the state government has cleared the site building at Vijaypur in Samba district and cleared all its encumbrances with the shifting of the nomadic families who lived there to a resettlement area.

The resettlement issue remained unresolved for long, preventing any construction activity on the site until the middle 2018 when CPWD started raising a boundary wall around it.