The Patna High Court-appointed three-member monitoring committee said, going by the pace of work, the Jaiprakash Narayan All India Institute of Medical Sciences would miss the March 2014 deadline.

The committee visited the site on Thursday. The high court had, on February 5, accepted the affidavits of the Centre and the B.L. Kashyap firm— entrusted with building the hospital — where they said construction would be over by March 2014.

The monitoring committee consists of advocate Brajesh Kumar, who has replaced petitioner advocate late M.P. Gupta, state government’s counsel Shashi Bhushan Kumar and Centre’s counsel Vinay Kumar Pandey. “As per high court directive, we have been making on-the-spot inspection from time to time. When we made a surprise visit today (Nov 28), we found work had stalled for days. We doubt the hospital would be ready by March,” Shashi Bhushan Kumar said.

AIIMS Patna director G.K. Singh said construction work has been stalled since Chhath puja. AIIMS sources said work has been stopped for over a month and half due to non-payment of around Rs 15 crore to the contractor by the Centre because of slow pace of work.

State counsel Kumar said 58 per cent of hospital construction work and 95 per cent of work related to medical college and hostel are done. He said AIIMS project director Ratnesh Kumar assured a 100-bed indoor patient department, against sanctioned strength of 960 beds, would be functional by end of January.