On 10 February 2014, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Union Health and Family Welfare Minister, inaugurated the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) at Rishikesh in Dehradun district of Uttarakhand.

The newly inaugurated AIIMS institute will have 200 beds along with 40 departments of super specialty and specialty care.

The medical college and outpatient facilities of the institute were started in the year 2013.

Located on the banks of the river Ganga, the institute aims to provide healthcare facility to people of the region and specifically to the pilgrims who come to visit pilgrim spots such as Haridwar, Rishikesh, Hemkunt Sahib and Kaliyar Sharief every year.

The AIIMS institute in Uttarakhand is the first institute among six institutes to be functional and to be set up under the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY).

The PMSSY aims at providing affordable healthcare facilities in different parts of the country in general, and augmenting facilities for quality medical education in the under-served states in particular.

The scheme was approved in 2006 and will be implemented in various phases. Phase-I has two factors - one for establishing six AIIMS institutions and the other to upgrade 13 existing government medical college institutions.

The six AIIMS institutes will be set up in states like Bihar (Patna), Chhattisgarh (Raipur), Madhya Pradesh (Bhopal), Orissa (Bhubaneswar), Rajasthan (Jodhpur) and Uttarakhand (Rishikesh).

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