India Opens A Radiotherapy Unit For A Region Of Fifteen Million

India opened an advanced radiotherapy unit in western Gujarat on Monday, serving eleven districts and about 15.4 million people whose cancer patients have until now travelled to Ahmedabad or Mumbai for the same treatment

Image Via: @JPNadda on X

Distance matters more in radiation oncology than in most specialties. A course of treatment is typically delivered in small daily doses over several weeks, so a patient from Porbandar or Amreli faced either repeated journeys of several hundred kilometres or a long stay in a city away from home and work. The facility at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Rajkot removes that for the Saurashtra region.

It cost around 390 million rupees and was built under a central programme intended to correct regional gaps in specialist care. Patients covered by India’s public health insurance scheme will be treated free; others will pay subsidised rates.

The unit houses a linear accelerator, a wide-bore CT simulator for treatment planning and a high-dose-rate brachytherapy unit, which delivers radiation internally and is used for gynaecological and head and neck cancers among others. The accelerator supports techniques that shape the radiation beam to a tumour and track it during delivery, to within a millimetre. The department has been treating patients since late May and expects to handle 500 to 700 cases a year to begin with, concentrating on head and neck, gynaecological, breast and bone cancers, alongside chemotherapy and surgery at the same hospital.

Health Minister J P Nadda, who opened the facility, said no one should be denied cancer treatment because of where they live or what they earn. He said India now has 18 operational institutes of the AIIMS network out of 22 approved, against one in Delhi three decades ago.

He also set out the scale of the country’s screening effort. Since 2018, about 377 million people have been screened for oral cancer, with roughly 250,000 cases found. India has among the world’s heaviest oral cancer burdens, associated with chewed tobacco and areca nut. Breast cancer screening has reached 177 million women, detecting about 95,000 cases, and cervical screening 98 million, detecting around 100,000. Some 440 million screenings each have been carried out for high blood pressure and for diabetes.

Officials cited a medical journal finding that nine in ten Indian cancer patients now begin treatment within 30 days, and pointed to pricing measures, duty exemptions and state-run pharmacies as having brought drug costs down.