After accusing babus of indulging in "red-tapism", Minister of State for Health Dinesh Trivedi today specifically targeted Health Secretary Sujatha Rao charging her with creating hurdles in the path of his "dream" project of a dedicated medical portal.

The creation of the portal had been announced by Trivedi along with National Knowledge Commission chief Sam Pitroda in November last year.

The Minister told PTI that around two months back, there had been a meeting of all the stakeholders, including Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, Pitroda, National Informatics Centre Director General B K Gairola, UIDAI chief Nandan Nilekani and around 80 young graduates from universities like Harvard.

"There were seven joint secretaries sitting there (at the meeting), nobody said anything then. Around 15 days later, Sujatha Rao said she is not being able to understand anything, so she wants to go to Nandan Nilekani," he said.

According to Trivedi, when he told Rao that Azad was on board with the project, she reportedly told him, "what does the minister know".

When asked if he had spoken to Azad on this issue, Trivedi said he had not done it as the Union Minister was abroad.

"Azad had given the sanction. I have nothing against any individual," he said.

"At least talk to the experts, try to understand. You reject it, but before that go through the process. Suddenly you just throw it out. My duty is only to try," he said.

"It was one of my dream projects. We had more than 80 college kids from Harvard and India working on it, The concept paper had been prepared by Sam Pitroda and the project was supposed to be implemented by the NIC," he said adding that the whole idea was to put everything on record.

Rao, who is in Bhopal for a meeting, refused to react immediately. She had yesterday said, "the idea of the project was good, but they (proponents of project) were asking for Rs 146 crore for five years and after that another Rs 25 crore for maintaining it.

"So there is a financial implication involved and the concept paper cannot be immediately the basis for releasing funds and getting action going," she had said.

Trivedi had yesterday said that the bureaucracy was engaging in red-tapism. "If you have all these young kids of India, who have just graduated from the colleges and universities, if you give them the Health Ministry then they can run it much better than the bureaucracy," he said.