IN the wake of cease-work at State-run hospitals in West Bengal, doctors of many Medical colleges on Friday submitted mass resignations. Over 200 senior doctors of various State-run hospitals across the State tendering resigned from their services to show solidarity with the agitators.

 

 

 

Late in the evening, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee met the senior doctors and later invited the agitators for talks on Saturday but they declined the offer. Agitating junior doctors in West Bengal on Friday were in no mood to relent as they demanded Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s unconditional apology and set six conditions to the adminstration for withdrawal of their stir, which has disrupted healthcare services in the State and spiralled to other parts of the country.

 

Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi said he called up Banerjee to discuss the issue but got no response from her.

“I have tried to contact the Chief Minister. I have called her up. Till this moment there is no response from her. If she calls me, we will discuss the matter,” he told reporters after visiting injured junior doctor Paribaha Mukhopadhyay at the hospital. “We want unconditional apology of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for the manner in which she had addressed us at the SSKM Hospital yesterday. She should not have said what she had,” a spokesperson of the joint forum of junior doctors, Dr Arindam Dutta, said.

 

The doctors, including Heads of Departments of medical colleges and other hospitals in Kolkata, Burdwan, Darjeeling and North 24 Parganas districts, sent their resignation letters to the state director of medical education, a senior health department official said.

 

Listing the six conditions, the agitators said Banerjee will have to visit the injured doctors at the hospital and her office should release a statement condemning the attack on them. “We also want immediate intervention of the Chief Minister. Documentary evidence of judicial inquiry against the inactivity of the police to provide protection to the doctors at the Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital on Monday night should also be provided,” Dutta said.

 

“We demand documentary evidence and details of action taken against those who had attacked us,” Dutta said.

The agitators also demanded unconditional withdrawal of all ‘false cases and charges’ which were imposed on junior doctors and medical students across West Bengal in the wake of strike.

 

They stressed on their demand for improvement of infrastructure in all health facilities as well as posting of armed police personnel there. The IMA also launched a four-day nationwide protest from Friday to express solidarity with the doctors agitating against the attack on their colleagues in West Bengal and has written to Union Home Minister Amit Shah demanding enactment of a central law to check violence against health care workers in hospitals.

Meanwhile, the Calcutta High Court refused to pass any interim order on the strike. Many kin of TMC leaders also backed the doctors stir. Among them were Banerjee’s nephew Abesh Banerjee, state Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim's daughter Shabba and son of TMC MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar.

 

“We express fullest solidarity to the current movement of NRS Medical College and Hosptial and other Government hospitals agitating to protest the brutal attack on them while on duty,” Dr P Kundu, director of the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine, said in the resignation letter.

 

“We strongly stand by the demands of security and protection for all healthcare personnel and we have tried our best to continue life saving services in the interest of our patients till now,” Prof (Dr) Dipanjan Bandyopadhyay, Head of Medicine department at North Bengal Medical College and Hospital, wrote in the resignation letter which contained the signature of 34 other senior doctors. “Under the present circumstances, it is not possible for us to continue our services indefinitely without minimum manpower resources. In the absence of any constructive development to end this crisis, we are pained to offer our resignation and request you to relieve us of our responsibilities,” the resignation letter read.

 

Docs across India on day-long strike: THE doctors’ strike that started in Kolkata earlier this week has now spread across India with the doctors’ association of AIIMS showing full support to their West Bengal colleagues.

After entire healthcare system in West Bengal was crippled over the past four days, now doctors’ in Delhi, Mumbai and other cities in India especially AIIMS hospitals in the national capital, Raipur, Patna and Punjab are observing protest shutdown.

 

Resident doctors in several Government hospitals in Kerala and Hyderabad also staged protests as they started their ‘cease work’ demonstrations in respective cities. Around 4,500 Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (MARD) stopped attending to patients in all the 26 government hospitals in the State simultaneously on Friday.

MARD General Secretary Deepak Mundhe told IANS the doctors will keep off all routine duties between 8 am and 5 pm and the hospital administration has been informed to ensure all other services are not hampered or patients inconvenienced.