All India Institutes of Medical Sciences

The All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) is a group of autonomous government public medical universities of higher education under the jurisdiction of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. These institutes have been declared by an Act of Parliament as Institutes of National Importance. AIIMS New Delhi, the forerunner institute, was established in 1956. Since then, 24 more institutes were announced.

, twenty institutes are operating and four more are expected to become operational until 2025. Proposals were made for six more AIIMS under the leadership of Narendra Modi. It is considered as pioneer health institution of Asia.

History
The foundation stone of AIIMS Delhi was laid in 1952. The first AIIMS was established in 1956 under the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Act, 1956. Originally proposed to be established in Calcutta, it was established in New Delhi following the refusal of Chief Minister of West Bengal Bidhan Chandra Roy. The act established AIIMS New Delhi, which was then known simply as All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and gave it the Institutes of National Importance (INI) status.

In 2003, the government of India announced the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY) initiative which aimed at "correcting regional imbalances in the availability of affordable/reliable tertiary healthcare services". This was to be done through two main channels: setting up AIIMS-like institutions and upgrading government medical colleges. Though the announcement was made in 2003 during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's tenure, the project was delayed owing to the power shift at the centre. PMSSY was officially launched in March 2006 and six AIIMS-like medical institutes were announced. The six institutes become operational through an Ordinance from September 2012. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Amendment) Bill, 2012 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 27 August 2012 in order to replace that Ordinance. Lok Sabha passed the Bill on 30 August 2012, it was introduced in Rajya Sabha on 3 September 2012 and passed on 4 September 2012. The Act was published on 13 September 2012.

The act also allowed the institutes to operate more autonomously, and awarded them the INI status. It also conferred the power to establish other AIIMS-like institutes by gazette notification and give them equal status.

Phase I
PMSSY was officially launched in March 2006 and six AIIMS-like medical institutes were announced for under-served states in Patna, Raipur, Bhubaneswar, Jodhpur and Rishikesh. Theses were originally assigned inr 3320000000 per institution, a sum which was raised to inr 8200000000 in 2010. They were later retroactively denoted "Phase I institutes".

Phase II
In 2013 a further gazette notification was made under the same Act, establishing AIIMS Raebareli. It was later denoted as "Phase-II" of PMSSY.

Phase III
Six medical college hospitals in Uttar Pradesh will be modernized and converted into super- speciality facility on the lines of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Uttar Pradesh, has influenced the decision to add two more colleges to the already cleared list of medical colleges that will be upgraded under Phase 3 of Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY). The four already under the third phase of the programme are the ones at Gorakhpur, Allahabad, Meerut and Jhansi. Apart from this, Sarojini Naidu Medical College, Agra and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Memorial (GSVM) Medical College, Kanpur also join the PMSSY list.

Phase IV
In July 2014, in the budget speech for 2014–15, the Minister of Finance Arun Jaitley announced a budget of inr 5000000000 for setting up four new AIIMS, in Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra and the Purvanchal region in Uttar Pradesh. These "Phase-IV" institutes, became AIIMS Mangalagiri in Andhra Pradesh and AIIMS Nagpur in Maharashtra, established in 2018 and later AIIMS Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh and AIIMS Kalyani in West Bengal, which started operation in 2019.

Phase V
On 28 February 2015, in the 2015–2016 budget speech, Jaitley announced five more AIIMS, in Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Assam and Tamil Nadu and an "AIIMS-like" institute in Bihar. On 7 November 2015, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi had announced development package for Jammu & Kashmir which includes the setting up of two AIIMS, in the capital cities of Jammu and Kashmir. Of these seven "Phase-V" institutes, sites have been assigned for at Changsari, near Guwahati, in Assam, Vijay Pur in the Jammu Division of Jammu and Kashmir, Awantipora in the Kashmir Division of Jammu and Kashmir, Bathinda in Punjab, Bilaspur in Himachal Pradesh, Madurai in Tamil Nadu and the latest, Darbhanga in Bihar, which was finally approved in September 2020. In December 2018 the government has approved and assigned partial funds for the AIIMS in Madurai, and a foundation stone was set in January 2019 And Not Yet Started Construction Till 2024(Next Election Came). AIIMS Bathinda started operation in 2019. AIIMS Bilaspur, AIIMS Guwahati and AIIMS Vijaypur became operational in 2020.

Phase VI
On 1 February 2017, in the budget presentation for 2017–2018, Jaitley announced two more AIIMS, in Jharkhand and Gujarat. Of these "Phase-VI" institutes, sites were identified in Deoghar for the institute in Jharkhand and in Khandheri near Rajkot for Gujarat. AIIMS Deoghar started operation in 2019 and AIIMS Rajkot in 2020.

Phase VII
A week after the 2017–2018 budget presentation, on 9 February 2017, Jaitley announced an AIIMS in Telangana. On 17 December 2018, the cabinet approved the AIIMS, to be located in Bibinagar, near Hyderabad. This institute was later denoted as "Phase-VII". It started operation in August 2019.

Phase VIII
On 1 February 2019, in the presentation of the interim budget for 2019–2020, Piyush Goyal, who was given temporary charge of the Minister of Finance a week earlier, announced an AIIMS in Haryana. This institute was later denoted as "Phase-VIII". In March, the cabinet approved the institute in Majra Mustal Bhalkhi, Rewari district.

Additional proposed AIIMSs
On March 1, 2022, PM Narendra Modi announced an AIIMS for the state of Manipur under the Atmanirbhar Bharat Scheme.

List of Institutes
, 5 AIIMS still are under development. In February 2022, the health ministry stated that all 24 new AIIMS will be functional by February 2025. There are also proposals for establishing AIIMS in Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Calicut, Mizoram & Tripura.

Admissions
AIIMS (New Delhi) was originally established as a super-specialty tertiary care centre with primary emphasis on research and specialized training facilities. MBBS is the basic medical course at bachelor's degree level. This is followed by master's degree level specialisation in general surgery, general internal medicine, pediatrics and other fields. Superspecialties are those healthcare fields whose practitioners need specialised certification after completing their postgraduation, examples being cardiothoracic and vascular surgery, rheumatology, neurology, and pediatric neurology. There are at least 45 superspecialties at AIIMS (New Delhi) at higher master's degree level. AIIMS also offers MSc and PhD level research courses.

There are about forty-two specialty post-graduate courses conducted at AIIMS (New Delhi). The entry is through a nationwide competitive examination, AIIMS PG, held every six months. Each year nearly 50 thousand medical graduates and 25 thousand dental graduates across the country compete for the limited number of positions, approximately <1% of the candidates are admitted through the process. AIIMS publishes The National Medical Journal of India.

Changes in Entrance Examination pattern under the provisions of NMC Bill 2019
As per the latest official notification released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, AIIMS, JIPMER -Puducherry, PGIMER -Chandigarh & all INIs (Institutes of National Importance) were directed to not conduct any Undergraduate entrance exams from 2020 onwards. Government has said that from 2020 session onwards, all such undergraduate admissions would be taken up only through a single national level examination NEET-UG conducted by NTA (National Testing Agency). Many field experts however criticized this exam unification, specifically with respect to AIIMS (New Delhi), citing the reason that the level of questions in AIIMS-UG entrance exams (for both MBBS & BSc Nursing courses separately) used to be of such a higher & deep logical-conceptual thinking capabilities, that they eventually served a greater advantage for selecting the most desirable students for such scientific courses.