Gujarat has formally asked the Centre to establish a full organ transplant facility at AIIMS Rajkot, state Health Minister Praful Pansheriya said at the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare’s 16th meeting in New Delhi, chaired by Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda. "The facility would allow thousands of patients in western Gujarat to receive timely and quality treatment closer to home," Pansheriya said, according to Prokerala’s report on the meeting. Medical Dialogues confirms the same request was raised alongside separate asks for stricter food-safety rules and a national antibiotic-use policy.
Why Rajkot, and why now
AIIMS Rajkot opened its campus only a few years ago and has been steadily adding specialised departments since, but organ transplantation, which needs dedicated operating theatres, transplant immunology labs and round-the-clock retrieval teams, has not been among them. Patients from Saurashtra and Kutch currently travel to Ahmedabad or out of state for kidney, liver or other transplants, a journey that can cost critical hours when a donor organ becomes available and needs to reach a recipient within a narrow window.
The timing lines up with a broader pattern at the Rajkot campus. Surgical volumes at AIIMS Rajkot have more than doubled over the past year as the hospital has expanded its specialist roster, suggesting the institution already has the case load and clinical infrastructure to justify a transplant unit, even if the formal capability has not yet been added.
What it means for western Gujarat
For families in Saurashtra and Kutch, a functioning transplant unit at AIIMS Rajkot would remove one of the biggest practical barriers to transplant care: distance. A patient in Bhuj or Junagadh needing a kidney transplant today faces a multi-hour trip to Ahmedabad for both the surgery and the follow-up visits that continue for months afterward. Cutting that distance matters most for organ retrieval logistics, since transplant teams typically have only a few hours to move a donated organ from a deceased donor to a matched recipient, and a shorter transport radius directly improves the odds of a successful match.
The request is not a funding commitment. The Centre has not indicated a timeline or budget for a Rajkot transplant unit, and setting one up would require accreditation from the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation on top of the physical infrastructure and trained staff. Gujarat’s plea puts the ask on record, but AIIMS Rajkot’s transplant capability remains, for now, a proposal rather than a project.
What to watch
The Union Health Ministry has not publicly responded to Gujarat’s specific request. Whether it appears in an upcoming Union Budget allocation or AIIMS Rajkot’s own expansion plans will be the first sign of whether this moves from a council-meeting ask to an actual facility.
Sources: Prokerala, Medical Dialogues
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.