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02-10-2024
Bureau Report + Agencies
NEW DELHI/ KOLKATA: Junior doctors in India’s West Bengal state resumed their full strike on Tuesday, complaining that the country’s judiciary has not made adequate efforts to restore justice after the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in August.
Doctors from the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, which represents about 7,000 physicians in the state, reinstated partial services last month, citing the flood situation in parts of the state.
The rape and murder of the 31-year-old female doctor in Kolkata, capital of the eastern state, set off a wave of protests by doctors demanding greater workplace safety for women and justice for their slain colleague, prompting India’s Supreme Court to create a hospital safety task force.
The top court, in its latest hearing on Monday, urged the state government to put in place all measures by Oct. 15 to meet the doctors’ demands.
It also asked the information ministry to ensure the identity of the victim was concealed and not shared online as required by law.
The doctors, however, said they were disappointed with the court’s decisions and were “compelled to return to a full ceasework”.
“Unless we receive clear action from the government on safety, patient services, and the politics of fear, we will have no choice but to continue our full strike,” the group said in a statement on Tuesday.
The doctors’ demands include increased police protection in hospitals and investigation of what they say is corruption in several medical colleges.
West Bengal, ruled by the regional Trinamool Congress party, has been slow to create new tribunals to try sex crimes speedily, according to a Reuters report.
Only six tribunals are operational in the state, a far cry from the target of installing 123 fast-track tribunals by March 2021.
Last month, 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, Reuters Television images showed.
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. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
