TATA MEDICAL CENTER - NEWTOWN
Rana Bose
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Cancer hospital opens doors today | ||
| OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | ||
Treatment at the state’s most “advanced” cancer hospital will start on Tuesday. Tata Sons chairman Ratan Tata on Monday afternoon inaugurated the first phase of the Rs 350-crore Tata Medical Centre in Rajarhat. Metro takes a look at the facility. Location About a kilometre from the first turning on the Main Arterial Road on the way to the airport from Salt Lake Number of beds The first phase has 167 beds. Another 300 beds will be added in the second phase. Facilities “The hospital has the best technology, equipment and treatment protocols, and these have been put in place in consultation and collaboration with specialists at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, and other centres of medical excellence around the world,” said a hospital official. The hospital will offer tomotherapy, a precision-based radiation therapy that destroys only cancer cells. Internal nuclear medicine, radio ablation for treating thyroid cancer and advanced PET CT for early diagnosis of malignancy will be among the other facilities available. Apart from cancer prevention and cure, it will offer rehabilitation and palliative care to the patients and act as a research hub. Treatment cost About half the beds in the first phase have been reserved for free treatment of poor patients. The remaining beds are in the “subsidised” and “paying” categories. Money collected from patients will be spent on the institution. Hospital officials said the treatment cost — even for those admitted on “paying beds” — would be “affordable”. Number of cancer patients in Bengal and those leaving for other states for treatment There are more than 200,000 cancer patients in the state and around 70,000 cases are detected every year. According to the data with the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, one-fourth of the more than 2 lakh patients it treats every year come from the east and the Northeast. A huge number of patients also go to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi or south India for treatment. “Certain treatments like radio ablation for thyroid cancer and tomotherapy were not available in the state till the Rajarhat hospital came up,” said surgical oncologist Gautam Mukhopadhyay. | ||
From: Rana Bose <ran...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, May 15, 2011 at 2:18 PM
Subject: TATA CANCER - NEWTOWN
To: akankha_newtown <Akankha...@googlegroups.com>, hila...@googlegroups.com, rh...@yahoogroups.com, "New Town (Rajarhat) Kolkata" <NewTown-Raja...@googlegroups.com>, bengal-dc...@googlegroups.com
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/tata-arrives-in-kolkata-today/435681/
Rana Bose
Tata Group writes to Mamata banerjee, seeks co-operation for future investments in West Bengal
The existence of such a letter and its receipt was confirmed to ET, by a very senior Trinamool Congress leader requesting anonymity. Tata circles present at Rajarhat on Monday at the soft launch of Tata Medical Center by group chairman Ratan Tata, confirmed having written the letter.
Sources say that the letter, signed by Tata Sons director RK Krishna Kumar, has reached Mamata Banerjee around the time of her victory over the CPM and the Left Front last weekend. The letter seems to have had immediate effect in the sense that a planned localised Trinamool protest, due apparently on Monday afternoon at the hospital site coinciding with Mr Tata's visit, was called off silently.
Both Trinamool and Tata circles confirmed that the letter mentioned about the soft launch of the Rs 350 crore Tata Medical Center on Monday and the fact that the formal inauguration would take place in September, for which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is being invited. The Center is a facility for care, treatment and rehab of cancer patients, modelled on Mumbai's Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH).
The wheel has thus come a full circle. The Tata letter is extremely significant for West Bengal in the context of the extreme bitterness that had taken place earlier. On October 3, 2008, when Ratan Tata finally drew a line and pulled out of the proposed Nano factory at Singur, he had famously said: "I am unfortunately a person who has often said, you put a gun to my head and pull the trigger or take the gun away, I won't move my head." In another famous quote, he had made a tongue-in-cheek reference to Mamata as a "bad M" compared to Narendra Modi, who was the "good M".
Mamata Banerjee, then in another avatar, was then using Singur as the launch-pad for her final assault on Writers Building. The issue was super sensitive: return of forcibly-taken agricultural land versus establishment of the Nano factory. "Go back Tata" her partymen screamed in those days.
Mamata in a New Avatar
Unfortunately, her jihad against the Marxists, drove the Tatas out of West Bengal to Gujarat and she was roundly ostracised by all and sundry and she came to be identified as an industry-hater. Times have since changed. Mamata has not only won the assembly elections, but she has single-handedly massacred the Left Front government 227-62, reducing CPM to just 40 seats in a 294-member House. As chief minister-designate, she is now in a different avatar. "We will attract large private sector investments," she had told ET after her epic victory last weekend.
Naturally, both sides cannot afford to be rigid timelessly. The Tata letter in that context is perhaps indicative of the fact that a thaw has set in, although it may yet be a bit too early for either side to talk about a new friendship-in-the-making.
Mr Tata came in around 3.30 pm on Monday afternoon along with Mr Krishna Kumar, Mr Shyamal Gupta, special advisor, Tata International, Mr Ravi Kant, vice chairman, Tata Motors , Mr H M Nerurkar, managing director, Tata Steel and Mr B Muthuraman, vice-chairman, Tata Steel. The media was not invited and kept outside the gates for hours. The Tata entourage left by the Centre's rear gate in the evening.
Coincidentally acronym-wise, Tata Medical Center (TMC) and Mamata Banerjee's party both have a matching set of letters. Tata circles said that about 50% of the beds at TMC were earmarked for free cancer treatment of patients who cannot afford the cost. The first phase of the project will house 170 patients, with a provision for extending capacity by another 150 beds. Outpatients would be extra. The TMC would be under the charge of Dr Mammen Chandy and specialists drawn from various parts of the world. The project was first announced at the Tata Tea annual general meeting in 2004 by Mr Tata.