Union Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan on Sunday said 262 new medical colleges were built after the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014.

Addressing a seminar here, he also said that while the Congress says that they have built 700 Navodaya Vidyalayas in the country, the Modi government has “sanctioned 692 Eklavya schools” in all tribal and backward districts of the country in just nine years.

“From independence till 2014, there were a total of 380 medical colleges across the country, but after the Modi government came to power, 262 new medical colleges were built,” Pradhan was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the Delhi BJP.

A research has been done by voluntary organisation Public Policy Research Center (PPRC) on the “achievements” of the Narendra Modi government in the last nine years, and based on that a research paper has been prepared on the “achievements of various departments of the central government” which are being released in collaboration with the local BJP units in different cities of the country, it said.

In this series, a research paper on nine years of Modi government’s work in the education and health sectors was released by Union minister Pradhan at the seminar organised by Delhi BJP here.

Pradhan said the Modi government has also done the work of increasing seats in medical colleges.

He said when the whole world was in the grip of COVID-19, PPE kits were not being made in India, but just two months after the lockdown, “we not only started making PPE kits but also started exporting them to other countries”.

The Union minister said that “only one AIIMS was built” in the country during the rule of the Gandhi family, and when Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government came to power, they built six AIIMS. But, the Manmohan Singh government that ruled for 10 years, “did not build any new AIIMS”, he said.

When Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014, “he took a pledge to provide good health services to the last citizen of the country, and today the result is that 15 new AIIMS have been dedicated to the public in the last nine years”.

The Union education minister said India is a knowledge-based society consisting of many civilizations. After 34 years, a national education policy was conceived by the Modi government, the story of which had started from 2014 and which was implemented in 2020. Not only this, the Modi government is also going to do the work of building Eklavya Model School at a cost of Rs 45 crore, which will also have a hostel facility, he added.

Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva said today there is a message going all over the world that “India is a rising power and this has been possible only under the leadership of PM Modi”.