For years, a cancer diagnosis in Mandi district meant a gruelling journey to a distant city — Chandigarh, Delhi, or beyond. That changes today. Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, inaugurated a 3 Tesla MRI machine and a Tertiary Care Cancer Centre at Nerchowk Medical College in Mandi, bringing advanced diagnostics and oncology treatment within reach of residents who had long been forced to seek care far from home.

What opened at Nerchowk — and why 3 Tesla matters

A 3 Tesla MRI scanner represents the higher end of clinical MRI technology, offering sharper resolution and faster scan times than the more common 1.5 Tesla machines — critical for neurological, oncological, and musculoskeletal imaging. Its installation at Nerchowk Medical College, the government medical facility serving Mandi and surrounding hill districts, means patients no longer need to travel hundreds of kilometres for precision imaging that was previously unavailable in the region.

Alongside it, the newly inaugurated Tertiary Care Cancer Centre establishes a dedicated oncology infrastructure at the college — a facility designed to handle diagnosis, treatment planning, and care for serious malignancies locally. CM Sukhu also announced that a PET scan machine — used widely in cancer staging and monitoring treatment response — will be made operational at the centre shortly, completing a diagnostic triad that was entirely absent from the district until now.

Mandi's long road to tertiary care

Nerchowk Medical College was established as part of Himachal Pradesh's push during the 2010s to decentralise medical education and reduce the burden on Shimla's Indira Gandhi Medical College. Mandi district, spread across rugged terrain with a population that depends heavily on government healthcare, has been incrementally upgraded — but advanced cancer care remained out of reach. The gap forced patients, often already financially strained by illness, to make repeated, expensive trips to metro hospitals.

The new Cancer Centre fits into a well-documented national pattern: Indian states strengthening district-level oncology and diagnostic infrastructure to ease pressure on metro referral chains. It also aligns with the framework of the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke, under which states have been encouraged to build integrated non-communicable disease care at district hospitals and medical colleges. The Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, launched in 2018, covers tertiary cancer care for eligible families — making the existence of a local facility a direct financial relief for beneficiaries who previously had to travel to empanelled hospitals in other cities.

Sukhu's pitch: quality care near home

Posting in Hindi on X, Chief Minister Sukhu framed the inauguration as a delivery on a core governance promise. 'बेहतर इलाज की सुविधा अपने ही घर के पास मिले, यही हमारी सरकार का प्रयास है' — 'Our government's effort is to ensure that better medical treatment is available close to home' — he wrote, directly addressing the years of outward migration for healthcare that Mandi residents had come to accept as routine.

The commissioning of the PET scan facility, once complete, will give Nerchowk a diagnostic stack — MRI, PET scan, and dedicated oncology care — that rivals what is available at many private hospitals in Tier-2 cities. The operational timeline for the PET unit has not been specified.