A year after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh initiated the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) project to create a pool of healthcare professionals, the first Central university and an autonomous institute are all set to come up in New Delhi.

At a meeting chaired by Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit last week, it was decided to allot land in Kanjhawala in north-west Delhi for these institutions, officials told The Indian Express.

The PHFI idea was to set up world-class autonomous institutions for long and short-term courses, conducting research on different aspects of healthcare — a new cadre of professionals who are “managers of health and not just of diseases.”

Last year, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs announced a one-time grant of Rs 65 crore for the foundation’s initial corpus while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stepped forward with Rs 69 crore and philanthropic organisations with another Rs 100 crore.

Members of the PHFI governing body include Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary T K A Nair and other government functionaries and representatives from contributing private agencies. Rajat K Gupta, Senior Partner of McKinsey, heads the governing body.

The PHFI has already entered into academic partnerships with over two dozen international universities and health institutes.

PHFI president Dr K S Reddy, former head of the department of cardiology at AIIMS, told The Indian Express that these institutions will offer post-graduate degrees in healthcare and will be open not only for medical practitioners but also people from other fields.