The promulgation of Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) Act, 1948 envisaged an integrated need based social insurance scheme that would protect the interest of workers in contingencies such as sickness, maternity, temporary or permanent physical disablement and death due to employment injury resulting in loss of wages or earning capacity. The Act also guarantees reasonably good medical care to workers and their immediate dependants.

Following the promulgation of the ESI Act, the Central Govt. set up the Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) to   administer   the   Scheme. Under the Act, ESIC provides comprehensive health care to all Insured persons and their families as one of the insurance related benefit. To administer this comprehensive medical care there is huge infrastructure comprising of 144 hospitals including arrangements with other Institutions for provision of super specialty care. There was a felt need to upgrade the medical facilities in ESI medical institutions all over the country so as to improve the  service, provide best medical care and to have in house super specialty services. With this objective of improving the quality of care provision, need was felt to constantly improve the medical competencies of its human resource. As a first step in realization of this vision, ESIC decided to set up ESI Post Graduate Institutes for Medical Sciences & Research (ESI-PGIMSR) at their hospitals at KK NAGAR, Chennai / Rajaji Nagar, Bangalore / Andheri (E) Mumbai/MGM-Parel Mumbai / Basaidarapur in the initial phase. This initiative marks the beginning of its venture into the field of medical education with the setting up of Medical Colleges, Dental colleges and Nursing schools all over India, to follow.