aashi.shekhar@hindustantimes.com
The Chandigarh Well being Schooling Centre (CHEC) at Authorities Mannequin Excessive Faculty (GMHS), Sector 22-the nation’s first of its variety, stays non-functional, two years after it was granted formal approval. With its repeated deferred opening, furnishings procurement is now cited as the newest bottleneck.
The venture traces its origins to 2017, when Rotary Worldwide Chandigarh submitted a proposal for the institution of CHEC. After the then-UT administrator’s approval, two docs from GMCH Sector 32, nominated by Rotary Membership, visited well being schooling centres in the USA and submitted a report recommending an identical facility modelled on the McMillan Centre within the USA.
The venture, nonetheless, languished for years earlier than gaining recent momentum in 2024. It was pitched as an ‘progressive venture’ on the venture approval board (PAB) assembly of the Samagra Shiksha Scheme 2024, which permitted it as the primary of its variety underneath the scheme. The central authorities sanctioned ₹50 lakh for the primary yr, with a further ₹1.2 crore promised based mostly on senior officers’ evaluation of the finished venture, with the express situation that the venture should be made practical inside that monetary yr.
A collaboration between the UT administration and the Chandigarh Rotary Membership, the centre was to offer complete well being schooling to roughly 1.5 lakh authorities college college students yearly, overlaying common well being, oral well being, vitamin, bodily exercise, substance abuse prevention, and social and emotional well being. The Rotary Membership dedicated to contributing ₹1 crore value of reveals, together with high-tech holographic fashions, and the ability was to incorporate six instructing rooms and an auditorium.
The centre has since missed 4 deadlines-December 2024, February 2025, March 2025, and January 2026. In late 2025, officers had attributed the delay to pending departmental approvals, giving a recent deadline of January 2026. Lacking that too, authorities now attribute the continued delay to procurement hurdles on the federal government e-marketplace (GeM).
Director college schooling Nitish Singla mentioned “The furnishings procurement is delayed as requisite specs weren’t out there on GeM. However now the tender is finalised and procurement will begin quickly, topic to the situation that furnishings is of specified high quality.”
The delay is notable on condition that the Union ministry of schooling had flagged the venture as one with potential for replication throughout the nation.
