Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday inaugurated nine medical colleges in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, setting a record adding a golden chapter in the field of medical and medical education in the country.

The new colleges are in Siddharthnagar, Deoria, Etah, Hardoi, Ghazipur, Mirzapur, Pratapgarh, Fatehpur and Jaunpur.

All nine will be well-equipped with 300 or more beds and admission will also start for 100 MBBS seats in each college through NEET from this session.

With this launch, the best of medical facilities will be available in the districts of Uttar Pradesh, which have always been considered backward and deprived of the latest medical facilities.

These nine medical colleges have been set up for a cost of Rs 2,329 crore.

Around 900 additional MBBS seats would be available in the state from here on.

The Medical College of Siddharthnagar has been named after Madhav Prasad Tripathi, the one in Deoria is named after Maharishi Devraha Baba, the Ghazipur one after Maharishi Vishwamitra, Mirzapur (Maa Vindhyavasini), Pratapgarh (Dr. Sonelal Patel), Etah (Veerangana Avantibai Lodhi), Jaunpur (Minister Umanath Singh) and Fatehpur (Amar Shaheed Jodha Singh Ataiya Thakur Dariyaon Singh).

With this, Uttar Pradesh became the only state in the country to inaugurate nine medical colleges simultaneously.

It will boost the health infrastructure in a big way as this endeavour will augment more than 3,000 hospital beds.

The boost to medical infrastructure is in line with the resolve of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to establish at least one medical college in each of the 75 districts.

Before 2017, there were a dozen medical colleges in the state.

There are 14 new medical colleges in the pipeline to be set up in Amethi, Auraiya, Bijnor, Bulandshahr, Chandauli, Gonda, Kanpur Dehat, Kaushambi, Kushinagar, Lakhimpur Kheri, Lalitpur, Pilibhit, Sonbhadra and Sultanpur districts by 2022-23.

Apart from existing 30 private medical colleges in the state, there are four central medical institutions — two AIIMS, one each at Rae Bareli and Gorakhpur, BHU and one Medical College in AMU.

The Yogi government has also cleared the policy and floated the tender to establish medical colleges under PPP model in the remaining 16 districts thus paving the way to hit a century of medical colleges in the state.

On Oct 20, Modi laid the foundation stone of a medical college in Kushinagar.