Hospital services were disrupted in several Indian cities on Tuesday after a doctors’ protest spread nationwide following the rape and murder of a trainee medic in the city of Kolkata, authorities and media said.
Thousands of doctors marched on Monday in Kolkata and the surrounding West Bengal state to denounce the killing at a government-run hospital, demanding justice for the victim and better security measures.
The 31-year-old doctor was found dead on Friday. Police said she had been raped and murdered and a police volunteer was subsequently arrested in connection with the crime.
Protests spread on Tuesday, with more than 8,000 government doctors in the western Maharashtra state, home to the financial capital of Mumbai, halting work in all hospital departments except emergency services, media said.
In the capital, New Delhi, junior doctors wearing white coats held posters that read, “Doctors are not punching bags,” as they sat in protest outside a large government hospital,
Similar protests in cities such as Lucknow, capital of the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, and in the western tourist resort state of Goa hit some hospital services, media said
“Pedestrian working conditions, inhuman workloads and violence in the workplace are the reality,” the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the biggest grouping of doctors in the country, told Health Minister J P Nadda in a letter released before they met him for talks on Tuesday.
General Secretary Anil Kumar J Nayak told the ANI news agency that his group had urged Nadda to step up security at medical facilities.
A high court in Kolkata ordered that the criminal investigation be transferred to India’s federal police, the Central Bureau of Investigation, indicating that the authorities were treating the case as a national priority.
Emergency services stayed suspended on Tuesday in almost all the government-run medical college hospitals in Kolkata, state official N S Nigam told Reuters, adding that the government was assessing the impact on health services.
Doctors in India’s crowded and often squalid government hospitals have long complained of being overworked and underpaid, and say not enough is done to curb violence levelled at them by people angered over the medical care on offer.
What happened on Friday was not an isolated incident. The most shocking case remains that of Aruna Shanbaug a nurse at a prominent Mumbai hospital, who was left in a persistent vegetative state after being raped and strangled by a ward attendant in 1973.She died in 2015, after 42 years of severe brain damage and paralysis.
More recently, in Kerala, Vandana Das a 23-year-old medical intern, was fatally stabbed with surgical scissors by a drunken patient last year.
In overcrowded government hospitals with unrestricted access, doctors often face mob fury from patients’ relatives after a death or over demands for immediate treatment. Kamna Kakkar,
Things have worsened over the years, says Saraswati Datta Bodhak, a pharmacologist at a government hospital in West Bengal’s Bankura district.
“Both my daughters are young doctors and they tell me that hospital campuses in the state are overrun by anti-social elements, drunks and touts,” she says. Dr Bodhak recalls seeing a man with a gun roaming around a top government hospital in Kolkata during a visit.
India lacks a stringent federal law to protect healthcare workers. Although 25 states have some laws to prevent violence against them, convictions are “almost non-existent”, RV Asokan, president of the Indian Medical Association (IMA),
an organisation of doctors, told me. A 2015 survey by IMA found that seven five percent of doctors in India has faced a form of violence at work.
“Security in hospitals is almost absent,” he says. “One reason is that nobody thinks of hospitals as conflict zones.”
Some states like Haryana have deployed private bouncers to strengthen security at government hospitals.
In 2022, the the Federal Government asked the states to deploy trained security forces for sensitive hospitals, install CCTV cameras, set up quick reaction teams, restrict entry to “undesirable individuals” and file complaints against offenders. Nothing much has happened, clearly.
Even the protesting doctors don’t seem to be very hopeful. “Nothing will change… The expectation will be that doctors should work round the clock and endure abuse as a norm,” says Dr Mitra. It is a disheartening thought.
