Chapter Twelve — AIIMS: The Princess, the Prime Minister, and a Bill Without Notes

How the Bhore Committee asked for a Johns Hopkins in India, Bidhan Roy refused Calcutta, a Kapurthala princess who had been Gandhi’s secretary rose in the Lok Sabha with no prepared speech, New Zealand paid for a foundation stone, and Ansari Nagar became the yardstick every later hospital in this book is still measured against.

The private houses in the earlier chapters — Apollo, Medanta, Max — were arguments with the state. This chapter is the state, trying to invent a standard so high that young doctors would no longer have to take a ship to London to become themselves.

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1946: a committee, a refusal, a city

Sir Joseph Bhore’s Health Survey and Development Committee, reporting in the last year of the Raj, asked for a national medical centre that would train the trainers — a place that would not merely treat, but set the pattern for every college that came after. Planners spoke of Johns Hopkins: faculty first, students chosen by open contest, alumni sent out to staff the rest of the country.

Nehru wanted it in Calcutta. Bidhan Chandra Roy, physician-chief minister, said no. The institute came to Delhi.

Ten years of money-hunting followed. The idea was cheap to praise and expensive to pour in concrete.

The woman who collected the world

Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: princess of Kapurthala, school in Dorset, Oxford, secretary to Gandhi for sixteen years, founder of the All India Women’s Conference, member of the Constituent Assembly, independent India’s first health minister — and its only woman in that first cabinet.

Gandhi had written to her in 1936: he was looking for a woman who would realise her mission. Are you that woman?

She spent a decade making the mission a campus. New Zealand, under the Colombo Plan, put down a grant large enough to start — a million and a quarter dollars in the records that survive. J.T. Watts, New Zealand’s minister, laid the foundation stone on 4 April 1952. Rockefeller money followed for books and instruments. Australia, West Germany, the Dutch, Ford: she asked, and the Cold War’s nicer pocket contributed. She gave a family house in Shimla as a faculty guesthouse. She hand-picked teachers.

They called her, with Dikshit and Nehru, the troika.

18 February 1956: no text on the desk

She rose in the Lok Sabha to move the Bill. Members later remembered that she had not brought a prepared speech.

“It has been one of my cherished dreams that for post-graduate study and for the maintenance of high standards of medical education in our country, we should have an institute of this nature which would enable our young men and women to have their post-graduate education in their own country.”

The House had been allotted sixty minutes. It talked for three days. The Rajya Sabha talked for four. Eight hundred pages of record. On 9 May she answered the upper house:

“I want this Institute to be a unique Institute… I want this to be something wonderful, of which India can be proud, and I want India to be proud of it.”

The motion was adopted. Act 25 of 1956. Institute of National Importance. Autonomy from 15 November 1956 — she guarded that clause as if it were a ward. Posts above a certain pay needed the government’s nod; below it, the Institute could hire like a university that trusted itself.

First director: Bhalchandra Babaji Dikshit, 1956 to 1964. First governing body, 27 May 1957: Amrit Kaur in the chair, A.L. Mudaliar, Jivraj Mehta, soldiers-turned-administrators, Dikshit at the table. They asked, when the hospital building looked too slow for the Third Plan, whether Safdarjung might be transferred. They accepted Rockefeller’s two hundred thousand dollars and kept building.

Entrance examinations in five cities. Four hundred candidates. Fifty MBBS seats. Merit advertised as a national property, not a city’s. The OPD blocks would one day carry her name.

The first lists, the first citation

Students arrived before the campus was a postcard. Hostels, a central lawn, a library that would bear Dixit’s name, Jawaharlal Auditorium. Speciality centres grew like extra hearts: cardiothoracic and neurosciences, cancer, ophthalmic sciences, dental. Jhajjar much later. Crowds always — the unofficial national waiting room.

By 1961 Massachusetts General Hospital, celebrating a hundred and fifty years, put AIIMS on a list with the distinguished houses of America, Canada and Europe, and sent Amrit Kaur a medallion and a book of citation. Dikshit wrote back that they would cherish the line: an undertaking uniting education and research to meet the health needs of four hundred million people.

First convocation, 1963: Radhakrishnan, Zakir Husain, Nehru, the princess, the director. The republic sitting in a row to watch its own experiment graduate.

She chaired twenty-five governing-body meetings and died in 1964, still president of the Institute she had midwifed. K.L. Wig, V. Ramalingaswami — the next names in a line that Indian medicine still recites like a pulse.

What the later country did with the template

Decades on, a scheme tried to plant an AIIMS in every state. Some of those children are sturdy. Some are hostels waiting for a hospital. The original on Aurobindo Marg remained the sentence people meant when they said the name without a city.

The problems that parliamentary committees still write down — overcrowded OPDs, tired emergency, attendants sleeping on floors, faculty posts empty — are not a refutation of 1956. They are what happens when a temple of modern India becomes the last stop for a subcontinent that never built enough temples.

Every private founder in the earlier chapters trained here, stole a registrar from here, or measured a protocol against here. Trehan, Shetty, Nageshwar Reddy, Badrinath’s fellows, Cherian’s students — the book’s other houses are, in one way or another, arguments with Ansari Nagar: either to equal it, to relieve it, or to charge what it cannot.

What AIIMS adds to the book

Ganga Ram is charity transplanted across a border.

Max is hospitality sold to a man who was tired of heat.

Apollo is a doctor who incorporated.

AIIMS is the republic deciding that excellence would be public.

It is the only chapter whose founding speech happened on the floor of Parliament. The knife came later. The Act came first.

A reconstructed corridor, 1956. A student from Madras, selected in a hall of four hundred, asks the new director whether this place will really make going abroad unnecessary.

Dikshit, if we allow him the citation he already loved, might have said:

“That is the whole of the assignment. If you still have to leave to become good, we have failed the princess.”

Amrit Kaur, if we give her the sentence she already spoke, would not have added much.

“I want India to be proud of it.”

That is how AIIMS was planned: Bhore’s paper, a refused Calcutta, a minister who collected New Zealand and Rockefeller the way other ministers collected votes.

That is how it was executed: a stone in 1952, a Bill without notes in 1956, fifty students chosen from the whole map, a director who treated autonomy like sterile technique.

That is how it expanded: by becoming the reference — and then, for better and worse, by being copied in cities that wanted the name before they had the faculty.

The private hospitals in this book saved individuals with speed and marble. AIIMS saved a profession’s self-respect. Every later chapter is, secretly, a footnote to that.