To cater to the needs of the north Indian market, Manipal Health Systems (MHS) will establish a 475-bedded Greenfield facility in New Delhi at an estimated investment of Rs 200 crore. The project will start by May this year.

Besides, Manipal Health Systems plans to invest another Rs 1,500 crore to start construction of hospitals at the existing Manipal hospital located on the old Airport road in Bangalore where it was to add another 300 beds. The existing Hospital is a 600-bed centre.

Another hospital was to come in at the new airport road located at Devanahalli in Bangalore. But these efforts have been postponed for the next phase of development. It has also deferred the move to start the hospital in Malaysia which was a 200-bed multi-super specialty medical centre with a focus on cardiology, orthopaedics and nephrology. Manipal was expected to have complete control over the hospital after the landowner decided to construct the facility, according to chief operating officer R Basil.

There has been a delay for the new projects to take off along with the existing funds because of the cash crunch in the market. Now MHS has gone in for equity and debt routes to raise Rs. 200 crore.

Further MHS has also set to commission the hospital at Vishakapatnam which is a 120-bed centre after a fund infusion of Rs 25 crore.

While the economic slow down has no impact on the healthcare sector which is only witnessing buoyant growth, the only challenge for potential viable projects to take off is that there was difficulty to raise cash in the recessionary times.

"We will first complete the projects on hand before we look at the other efforts in Bangalore which are the Greenfield projects. This will take at least 18-24 months to take off," stated Basil.

MHS is set to close the FY 2009 ending March with earnings of Rs 400 crore from the healthcare space which covers 13 hospitals including three tertiary care super specialty hospitals and 10 multi specialty hospitals. The new facilities have also managed to break even in the first year of its operations, stated Basil.