AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences)

AIIMS New Delhi wasn’t built with Indian government money alone. Its founding grant came from New Zealand, under a Cold War-era aid programme called the Colombo Plan. Seven decades later, that single institution has grown into a nationwide network. Its name has become a byword for elite medical training and treatment across India.

Must Know

• The idea for AIIMS came from a 1946 recommendation of the Health Survey and Development Committee, also called the Bhore Committee.
• The foundation stone of AIIMS New Delhi was laid in 1952. Health Minister Rajkumari Amrit Kaur oversaw the project, and New Zealand funded it under the Colombo Plan.
• Parliament passed the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences Act on 2 June 1956. The Act declared AIIMS New Delhi an Institute of National Importance.
• The 1956 Act has 29 sections and no formal chapters. It covers the Institute’s establishment, its governing body, and its functions and powers.
• AIIMS operates autonomously under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Its campus sits in Ansari Nagar, New Delhi, on land the government allocated for it.
• AIIMS’s founding mandate was to set a high standard of medical teaching. It aimed to demonstrate this standard to other medical colleges across India, not just to train its own students.

Good to Know

• On 15 August 2003, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY). Its goal was to fix regional imbalances in tertiary healthcare and medical education.
• PMSSY’s first phase set up six new AIIMS-like institutions. These opened in Patna (Bihar), Raipur (Chhattisgarh), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), Bhubaneswar (Odisha), Jodhpur (Rajasthan), and Rishikesh (Uttarakhand).
• The expansion didn’t stop there. A total of 22 more new AIIMS have since been announced. States including Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal have identified locations for their own campuses.
• As of 2026, 25 AIIMS institutes have been approved nationwide. Of these, 20 are fully operational, together offering more than 2,250 MBBS seats each year.
• AIIMS New Delhi is a distinct institution from the Indian Institutes of Technology, though both are held up as India’s premier public professional education brands. See GK0081 — Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) for a comparison in engineering education.

Current Affairs

• 9 July 2026: Health Minister JP Nadda reviewed AIIMS Bibinagar’s progress, in Hyderabad. Construction was 87% complete, with the remaining work due by December 2026. The institute now registers about 1,800 outpatients a day. (Source: PIB)
• It has 132 faculty members and 133 senior residents. Two MBBS batches have already completed the course. The Centre has sanctioned Rs 64 crore in research grants, drawing 1,156 researcher applications. The institute has also adopted six villages, running 547 mobile medical camps. (Source: PIB)

Test Yourself

Please wait…

1. The Parliament of India passed the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences Act, declaring AIIMS New Delhi an Institute of National Importance, in which year?

1946

1956

1952

1961

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Great to Know

• The Supreme Court has weighed in on AIIMS more than once. This includes how its Fundamental Duties obligations apply to its own students. That case, AIIMS Students’ Union v. AIIMS (2001), tested how Article 51A of the Constitution interacts with reservation policy in medical admissions.
• AIIMS New Delhi’s origin story is unusual for a flagship Indian public institution. It began as a foreign-funded project, built with New Zealand’s Colombo Plan grant. This came during a period when India was still assembling its own higher-education infrastructure from scratch after independence.
• The shift from “one AIIMS” to “an AIIMS network” mirrors a wider pattern in Indian institution-building. Take a single successful, prestigious model, then replicate it geographically to spread its benefits. This beats building a different institution from scratch each time. The IIT and Central University networks followed a similar logic.