Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will launch the OPD service at the Super Specialty Cancer Institute (SSCI) in the state capital on Tuesday.

The SSCI would be the biggest cancer centre in the country once it gets fully functional.

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With 1,250 beds, it will be bigger than the National Cancer Institute of Jhajjar (Haryana) which has 700 beds. The institute will be twice the size of the Tata Memorial Institute of Mumbai which has about 650 beds and will be four times of Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute.

The Chief Minister will dedicate the SSCI’s main OPD block in a virtual ceremony in the presence of Union Defence Minister and Lucknow MP Rajnath Singh.

The Out-patient services like day care, radiation oncology and surgical oncology will begin at the SSCI. After this, 750 beds would be made functional in the first phase and 500 in the second.

According to Additional Chief Secretary, Medical Education, Dr. Rajneesh Dubey, “Besides being a benchmark in patient care by providing state-of-the-art and affordable services, SSCI will serve as the apex state cancer institute for capacity building. It will also start a population-based cancer registry for the state capital.”

The institute will follow the DMG format. Under this, specialists of all disciplines sit in a room along with the patient who sits just opposite them as is witnessed in high profile interviews. The experts will listen to the medical issues of the patient and finalise the treatment line.

The Chief Minister wants the facility to become functional at the earliest to save scores of poor people in the state from selling their assets to afford cancer treatment in big cities.

The facility will not only benefit people in Uttar Pradesh but also those from Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

One in three patients, reporting at the Indian Council of Medical Research’s national cancer registry, is from these three states.

The numbers suggest that Uttar Pradesh desperately needed a state-of-the-art facility with all services under one roof.

As per a 2017 report on cancer, the state was among the worst-affected ones. In 2016, Uttar Pradesh saw 6.7 lakh of the 39 lakh cancer cases reported in the country.

Uttar Pradesh stood prominently among the states accounting for 44 per cent of India’s cancer burden. The others were north-eastern states, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Haryana, Assam, Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh.

Meanwhile, Samajwadi Party President Akhilesh Yadav, who had initiated the entire project during his regime, took to Twitter to slam the Yogi Adityanath government. “It seems that the BJP government has been formed only to inaugurate projects started by us,” he tweeted.