A government plan to build a 500-bed cancer hospital in Rajarhat, close to the Tata Medical Centre, might turn Calcutta into a cancer treatment hub for the east.

Government sources said on Wednesday the Union health ministry and the Bengal government had planned to jointly set up a campus of the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) in New Town, where the 167-bed Tata cancer facility is located.

The decision to open a second campus of the institute was conveyed to its director Jaydip Biswas at a meeting in Delhi on Wednesday with the Union minister of state for health, Sudip Bandopadhyay, and senior officials.

“The new facility will have a 24-hour emergency department, something that is lacking on our Hazra premises. Like Mumbai’s Tata Memorial Hospital and AIIMS in Delhi, the Rajarhat campus will have facilities to treat patients with nuclear medicine,” Biswas told Metro from Delhi.

“Treatment with nuclear medicine is expensive. The Centre’s efforts are laudable because it promises cheaper treatment,” oncologist Gautam Mukhopadhyay said.

Apart from a main building with all subspecialities of oncology, the Rajarhat campus will house a nursing college, a centre for rehab medicine, quarters for doctors and nurses and shelters for patients’ relatives.

Sources said the hospital would come up at a cost of around Rs 563 crore.

The Centre will provide 90 per cent of the infrastructure capital and 80 per cent of the recurring and maintenance costs.

Health officials in Delhi, requesting not to be named, said the plan was yet to be approved by the expenditure finance committee of the finance ministry.

But minister Bandopadhyay said in Delhi the Centre had already released Rs 55 crore for the project and half the amount had been spent on registration of the 10 acres earmarked for the hospital in Action Area I and erecting a boundary wall.

“The first phase, comprising 300 beds, should be completed in two-and-a-half years (from now) and the remaining 200 should be ready by 2017,” the minister said.

Biswas said chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the junior health minister were both keen to ensure that the hospital came up at the earliest.

“The 10-acre plot has been with us since 2008. The soil testing is over and the building plans have been approved by the health ministry,” Biswas added.

CNCI was first given 1.47 acres in Tollygunge for its second campus in 2005 but construction did not start. This land was returned when the hospital was sanctioned 10 acres in Rajarhat for the same purpose.

The CNCI hospital in Hazra, the land for which was donated by Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, has 208 beds.

The Tata hospital, in Action Area II and around a kilometre from the CNCI plot, is expected to be part of a national cancer grid, an idea mooted by oncologists at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai to provide a network for seamless exchange of information and data and for research collaboration.

Senior oncologists said there was nothing unusual about two cancer hospitals in the same city.

“The need is really big — India has a shortage of cancer management facilities,” said Rajendra Badwe, a senior oncologist and director of the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai.

“About 20 per cent of our patients in Mumbai are from Bengal or the Northeast.”

The Tata Memorial Hospital gets about 50,000 new patients each year.

The Union health ministry estimates that about 700,000 new patients are diagnosed with cancer every year in India, about 80,000 of them are from Bengal alone.