Thousands of doctors halt services across the country after 31-year-old trainee medic is found dead in a hospital.
Hospital services have been disrupted in several Indian cities after a doctors’ protest spread nationwide following the rape and murder of a trainee medic in the city of Kolkata, authorities and media reports said.
Thousands of doctors marched on Monday in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state, and other cities in the state to denounce the killing at a government-run hospital, demanding justice for the victim and better security measures.
The body of the 31-year-old trainee doctor was found dead inside the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata on Friday. An autopsy showed she was raped before being killed.
A police volunteer was subsequently arrested in connection with the crime.
Protests spread to other parts of India 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, local media reports said.
The Federation of Resident Doctors Association had called for nationwide halting of elective services in hospitals starting Monday.
Emergency services stayed suspended on Tuesday in almost all the government-run medical college hospitals in Kolkata, state official NS Nigam told the Reuters news agency, adding that the government was assessing the effect on health services.
In the national 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, reports 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 JP Nadda in a letter released before they met him for talks on Tuesday.
IMA General Secretary Anil Kumar J Nayak told the ANI news agency that his group had urged Nadda to step up security at medical facilities.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare did not immediately comment.
“We feel a free and fair atmosphere is required for doctors, or else, no skilled work is possible. We also demand installation of CCTV cameras in the hospitals,” a doctor at Gobind Ballabh Pant Hospital in the northeastern city of Agartala told the Indian Express newspaper.
A high court in Kolkata ordered that the criminal investigation into the incident be transferred to the federal agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, indicating that the authorities were treating the case as a national priority.
India’s medical education regulator, the National Medical Commission, issued a notice to all medical institutions calling for CCTV cameras to be installed in sensitive areas and for adequate security staff to be available, the newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The notice also called for the campus including all corridors to be well lit in the evening for staff to safely walk from one place to another.
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 about the medical care on offer.