Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Jan 7: Back with massive support, the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee seems to have picked up he slugfest with the prime minister Narendra Modi what she had left off about a year ago in January, last year, pending the state Assembly elections.
The last time the two leaders had shared a platform was in Kolkata in January, 2021, when Modi was addressing a gathering on Netaji Shubash Chandra Bose’s birth anniversary. Banerjee had left the venue without addressing the meeting feeling offended by the chants of “Jai Shri Ram” by the BJP supporters at the venue.
That was before the Assembly elections held in May when Modi was hoping to win above 200 seats for the BJP in the 294-member state Assembly. But the outcome of the elections was just the opposite, Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress returned with 213 seats and party kept adding to its kitty as several elected BJP members joined the TMC leaving the saffron party in total disarray in the state.
Banerjee had another confrontation with Modi when the prime minister visited the state in May last year in the wake of severe cyclonic damages to the state. She had turned up only briefly for a review meeting with Modi at a North Bengal airport and left in a huff along with her chief secretary without attending the meeting objecting against the presence of the leader of the opposition Subhendu Adhikari.
The Prime Minister’s Office had again ensured the participation on Friday of the BJP leader Adhikari at the virtual “inauguration” by Modi of the second campus of the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) in Kolkata in the presence of Banerjee despite the Chief Minister expressing strong reservations over what she described as “breach of protocol.”
“The second campus of CNCI has been built in line with the prime minister’s vision to expand and upgrade the health facilities in all parts of the country. CNCI was facing a heavy load of cancer patients and a need for expansion was being felt for some time. This need will be fulfilled through the second campus,” a statement issued by the PMO said.
The second campus of CNCI has been built at a cost of over Rs 530 crore, out of which around Rs 400 crores have been provided by the Union government and the rest by the West Bengal government, in the ratio of 75:25. “The campus is a 460-bedded comprehensive cancer centre unit with cutting-edge infrastructure for cancer diagnosis, staging, treatment, and care,” read the statement.
It is equipped with modern facilities like Nuclear Medicine (PET), 3.0 Tesla MRI, 128 slice CT scanner, Radionuclide therapy unit, endoscopy suite, modern brachytherapy units, etc. The campus will also work as an advanced cancer research facility and will provide comprehensive care to cancer patients especially those from Eastern and North-Eastern parts of the country, the PMO statement said.
The West Bengal chief minister, who thanked the prime minister for inviting her to the event, said the institute holds a special place for her given that her college days were spent in the vicinity. But irked by the presence of her bete noir Adhikari, Banerjee hit out at Modi claiming that what the prime minister was “supposed to be inaugurating” was actually inaugurated and taken possession of by the state government long ago.
Lending her voice to the frequent opposition complaint that the BJP-led Central government steals credit for state projects, Banerjee said, “I have come to the programme because of the Prime Minister. Because Pradhan Mantri ji is virtually inaugurating this project.” Banerjee had stayed off from office because of cases of Covid in her close family as well as several ministers in her cabinet.
“The Honourable Health Minister had telephoned me twice. This is why I thought this is a Calcutta programme in which the Prime Minister has taken an interest. I’d like to inform him that we have inaugurated the programme first. How did we do it? When Covid started and we needed a Covid centre, I went there one day. The Rajarhat second campus of Chittaranjan Hospital. I saw it was linked to the state government and we inaugurated it,” Banerjee declared.
There was more. The Prime Minister, she said, “will be happy to know that we are funding 25 per cent and cent per cent recurring expenditure of Rs 71 crores annually. We have also given the 11 acres of land to build this campus. This is why the centre and the state should work together for public benefit,” she said.
While “inaugurating” the campus later, Modi by and large confined himself to the country’s achievements in the Covid vaccination drive claiming it to be a “historical day” when India completed administering 150 crore doses of vaccine. He said of the entire eligible population, over 90% citizens have received at least one dose vaccine against the coronavirus disease. “In just five days, over 1.5 crore children aged between 15-17 have been given a dose,” he added.
Taking to Twitter, Modi said a day ago the CNCI campus would “augment healthcare capacities in eastern India and in the northeast.” Efforts are on to set up a medical college in each district, 19 State Cancer Institutes and 20 Tertiary Cancer Centres, he said. “We are going to produce more doctors over the next 10 years than we did in the last 70 years,” he asserted.
An autonomous body under the Centre, CNCI is the only government-run cancer hospital in Bengal. Started in 1950, the existing CNCI facility in Hazra has been under tremendous pressure due to the increasing load of patients. An expansion plan for a new campus in Tollygunge, which had been drawn up in 2005, had to be scrapped due to the unavailability of adequate land. The proposal for the Rajarhat unit was made in 2008. The pandemic has delayed the inauguration of the new campus spread over 11 acres of land.
