After two years of planning, preparations, appraisals and clearances, two major World Bank-funded projects for modernisation and expansion of the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine and the All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health have been dropped. The Centre and the World Bank, to improve disease surveillance nationwide after the Surat plague outbreak, had worked out about 16 or 17 projects that would have focussed on augmenting diagnostic capabilities at the regional level and built an elaborate, nationwide disease communication network.