ICICI Bank on Friday announced a Rs 1,200-crore commitment to help Tata Memorial Centre expand its patient intake by over 20 per cent annually. The second largest private sector lender’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) arm will spend the money over a nearly four-year period to build three facilities at Kharghar in Navi Mumbai on the outskirts of the financial capital, Mullanpur in Punjab and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh.

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Girish Chandra Chaturvedi, the chairman of the second largest private sector lender, said the three facilities will be fully functional by 2027 and will enable TMC to handle 25,000 more cancer patients per year, which will be 25 per cent higher than the current capacity to treat about 1.2 lakh patients a year.

"This (the financial commitment) is a step towards resolving a problem which we are foreseeing to aggravate, especially as urbanisation increases," he told reporters at TMC’s flagship hospital here after signing three Memorandums of Understanding for the centre.

Chaturvedi said the bank has Rs 500 crore of CSR corpus ready right now for the three facilities, and will be adding to the corpus as the years go. of the spending cycle, the overall CSR corpus will be Rs 2,500 crore, which means the bank will be spending 50 per cent of its overall money on this partnership, Chaturvedi said.

He added that at present, the bank spends about 25 per cent of its CSR budget on healthcare which may go up or down depending on the need.

Rajendra Badwe, the director of the country’s most premier cancer treatment and research institution, said cancer prevalence is higher in urban areas, and the number of those who get affected by it is set to increase with a jump in urbanization.

In all the three places, the hospital already has a presence and the money received from ICICI Bank will be put into a brownfield expansion for new phases and blocks, Badwe said, adding that the operational expenses for its running will be borne by the Department of Atomic Energy.

He added that TMC has created a hub and spoke model, under which there is a bigger facility or hub in certain pockets of the country like Varanasi, Punjab, Guwahati etc having dedicated facilities to deal with both common and uncommon cancers, while the spokes are a step down facilities having only the common cancer treatment.

Under this partnership, TMC’s advanced centre for treatment, research and education in cancer in Navi Mumbai will get a radiation oncology block, while ICICI Foundation will also set up two paediatric and haematological oncology blocks at TMC’s Homi Bhabha Cancer Hospital and Research Centre at Mullanpur in Punjab, and Visakhapatnam.

TMC treats around two-thirds of its patients for free, while 20 per cent get it at a markup of 10 per cent over the actual costs, while the remaining ones pay over 60 per cent higher. The remaining shortfall between revenue collections and the costs incurred is received from the government and from corporate donors, Badwe said.