Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president K Annamalai said that the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) facility at Madurai will be completed by 2026. The BJP leader was speaking at Othakadai town in Madurai district on Saturday, August 5. Annamalai is currently on his padayatra, branded En Mann, En Makkal, across the state. “The AIIMS that is meant to come up in Madurai is different from the AIIMS facilities in other states. Those are satellite facilities and extensions of the [main] AIIMS in Delhi. The Madurai AIIMS will service all of the southern states, just as the Delhi AIIMS does for the northern states,” Annamalai said, adding, “The other AIIMS facilities have been allocated Rs 600 to 650 crore. Madurai AIIMS has been allocated funds of Rs 2,600 crore. It will be opened to the public in May 2026. About 20,000 people will be employed both directly and indirectly.”
The incomplete AIIMS facility in Madurai has been a matter of controversy between the BJP and Opposition parties, including the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Congress, and others, ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone in 2019. No further work towards the project has been done since then by the Union government. The incomplete project became an important talking point in Tamil Nadu during the Assembly elections of 2021, with DMK leader Udhayanidhi Stalin campaigning with a single brick to mock the ‘completion’ of the project.
More recently, in September last year, BJP national president JP Nadda drew widespread backlash when he claimed that 95% of the Madurai AIIMS project had been completed. The statement received both criticism and mockery, after several leaders from the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) visited the site and noted that even the board announcing the upcoming project was missing. Nadda’s verifiably false claim also led to many memes circulating on social media, poking fun.
Annamalai has currently completed 10 days of his padayatra. The campaign proposes to cover all 39 Lok Sabha constituencies of Tamil Nadu and is scheduled to conclude on January 11, 2024, ahead of the general elections. The BJP state president will be covering 1,770 km by foot and travel by vehicle in rural areas. Ten major rallies are planned during the padayatra.
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