Union Minister of Health, Family Welfare and Chemicals and Fertilizers Mansukh Mandaviya will inaugurate the new building of the ICMR-National Institute of Traditional Medicine (ICMR-NITM) in Belagavi on Thursday.
This facility is the first to start a COVID-19 testing lab in the district. It completed over five lakh tests in a span of one year.
Ministers of State for Health S.P. Singh Baghel and Bharati Pravin Pawar will join the virtual event in the morning. They will also participate in the inauguration and foundation stone laying ceremony for new infrastructure of ICMR-NIMR, New Delhi, and National AIDS Research Institute (ICMR-NARI), Pune.
ICMR-NITM is one of the 27 institutes of the Indian Council of Medical Research. It started as a Regional Medical Research Centre in 2006 from makeshift laboratories. It was upgraded to NITM in 2017 with a research mandate to explore evidence-driven integration of traditional and modern medicine for stronger health systems. Central Public Works Department began work on the main laboratory building in 2020 and completed it recently.
Built at a cost of ₹38.54 crore, ICMR-NITM’s new building has two blocks with G+3 floors covering an area of 9292.65 sq m. It has a reception area, offices, library, departments of Ethnomedicine, Pharmacology and Health Systems Research in the front block along with a seminar hall, exhibition hall, discussion/video conferencing rooms, board rooms, networking hall, clinical trial unit and a museum of ethnomedicinal plants of the Western Ghats.
The other block houses the Central Instrumentation Facilities that will be thrown open for all academics and researchers under ICMR’s I-RISE (Instrument Resource Sharing Platform), the natural product chemistry laboratory, bioinformatics, animal cell culture, microbiology and molecular biology laboratories. It will also house a viral diagnostic research laboratory that will cater to the diagnostic needs of the region for rapid identification of outbreaks of viral infections.
