The Department of Science and Technology, with the support of the Indian Space Research Organisation, will help set up 15 primary centres of diagnostics, attached to the Government hospitals in the North India, to take the gains of latest advancements in the health care system to the deprived class.

The first of the kind will be ready for opening at the Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi by next month with the latest medical equipments supplied by the Science and Technology Department. Each such centre will cost around Rs 10 lakhs, and the first phase of the project will cost Rs 1.5 crore.

Besides, India has also signed an agreement with Finland to set up an Indian Institute of Diagnostics under the aegis of the DST, as a premier institute for diagnostic facilities and training. The modalities of the project are being worked out, sources said.

A specially assigned room in a hospital with latest equipment and a resident doctor will be connected to the premier institutes like AIIMS in Delhi with ISRO giving technical assistance. Extending the benefits of tele-medicines, the rural people will get diagnostic helps from the eminent doctors elsewhere in the leading institutions.

Instead of a point-to-point connectivity, between the doctor and the patient, this DST-support facility would give multi-point connectivity through servers linking super speciality hospitals in the country.

Leading industry players in the medical devices market also have offered assistance in the form of equipments to set up these centres, planned by the Department of Science and Technology.

The project was planned and being implemented after Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal himself came across the hardships of the poor people in the Government hospitals for the want of equipments and able consultations.

The ISRO has been in the field of tele-medicine, in collaboration with many agencies, to extend similar facilities to the rural people who are deprived of the advanced treatments. ISRO established its space-based telemedicine network in 2001. An impact study on telemedicine on 1000 people showed that they saved 81 per cent of the cost because of savings in travel, stay and treatment in city hospitals.