Lokesh opens Sneha Sandhya’s expanded geriatric and palliative centre

Nara Lokesh on Monday, 31 August 2026, inaugurated the Sneha Sandhya Age Care Foundation Centre for Geriatric and Palliative Care at Gambheeram in Anandapuram mandal of Visakhapatnam district. He opened the fourth and fifth floors, met donors, and cast the 100-bed hospital — built across about one lakh square feet — as a model the country and the world could study.

The emotional centre of the speech was remembrance. Lokesh recalled the late Dr S.V. Adinarayana Rao and said the family had allocated six acres for social service spanning a college, Akshaya Patra and Hare Krishna midday-meal work, and elderly care. Against that legacy he placed a harder social diagnosis: some parents, he said, are neglected in old age. Values education from Anganwadi through higher education, he argued, is not optional; a developed India without values is not a developed India.

State support numbers entered the same frame. Lokesh cited a pension of ₹4,000 for the elderly and ₹6,000 for persons with disabilities. He also said government would not run programmes against people or nature, and that public representatives must dispel misconceptions around Visakhapatnam’s rapid growth. On the same tour he inspected an Intel data centre and spoke of air-cooling to cut water use in data centres — a side note that shows how the Vizag day mixed care infrastructure with technology messaging.

On AIG Hospitals, Lokesh said the project would be completed in two years. The separate AIG foundation-stone cutting records the project note’s Phase-1 target of October 2028. This page leaves both statements as spoken versus project-note timelines rather than forcing a single invented date.

Present at Gambheeram were O. Naresh Kumar, the fundraising chair; G. Sambasiva Rao; N. Satyanarayana Raju; Sunkara Sasi Kiran of the Prema Group; Dr R. Sasi Prabha; MP M. Sribharat; TDP state president Palla Srinivasa Rao; and MLAs Ganta Srinivasa Rao and Vishnu Kumar Raju. The attendance list matters because geriatric and palliative care in India often fails not for lack of speeches but for lack of sustained donors and political cover after the ribbon is cut.

For Visakhapatnam’s ageing households, a 100-bed specialised centre with new floors opened is a concrete addition to a thin palliative map. This cutting stays with that inauguration, the six-acre social-service legacy, the pension figures, and the values argument — and leaves the AIG timeline tension visible rather than silently edited away. Palliative and geriatric beds are scarce relative to Andhra Pradesh’s ageing curve. Opening new floors in a 100-bed specialised centre is therefore not ceremonial filler on a minister’s tour; it is capacity. The test after 31 August is occupancy with proper pain management and home-care step-down, not only donor photographs. Lokesh’s pension figures — ₹4,000 for the elderly and ₹6,000 for persons with disabilities — set a state baseline that NGOs like Sneha Sandhya still have to bridge with clinical care the pension alone cannot buy.