Frontline COVID Doctors Across India Are Fighting For Their Salaries

Irked over non-payment of salaries for four months in a row, the resident doctors of North Delhi Municipal Corporation's Hindu Rao hospital have announced the discontinuation of the COVID and emergency services in the facility from Saturday.

AFP

The decision to disengage themselves from the COVID and emergency services is a move to aggravate the protest the doctors have been doing since Monday.

No salaries since June

The resident doctors and nursing staff of the hospital are on partial "symbolic indefinite strike" since Monday where they refrained themselves from services, except emergency, and demonstrated daily for two hours in the morning over non-payment of their due salaries since June.

AFP

"We are tormented in ways to surpass our ethics of being called as skilled workers to public demonstrators seeking our primitive rights to be remunerated. This is in all physiological and psychical ways too dispiriting, and heart-wrecking and we would like to regrettably disengage from the COVID facility from Saturday, illustrating our debilitated strength to administer our expertise.

'Becoming increasingly difficult to run basic errands'

We are failing miserably even to run our basic errands and accomplish our daily routine hence we are retracting further to provide our services in the emergency COVID department," the statement by the Resident Doctors Association (RDA) of the hospital said.

This is not an isolated incident during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BCCL

In the past few months, there have been several such protests across the country. Doctors and other frontline health workers have protested across the country demanding their salary dues and better working conditions.

Similar protests across country

In September, as many as 868 junior doctors in Kerala had resigned from Covid-19 duty to protest against the salary cut introduced by the state government to tide over the financial crunch.

Last month the Karnataka government was forced to concede to the demands made by over 5,000 government doctors to increase their salary after they threatened to go on an indefinite strike.

BCCL

In Mumbai, doctors at civic-run medical colleges staged a silent protest by sporting black ribbons on their arms against the corporation's decision to slash their quarantine periods after COVID duties from one week to a day.

In Telangana too, there were protests by doctors demanding salary hikes.