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Kolkata: Junior doctors in many hospitals in India remained away from work on Sunday (August 18), demanding swift justice for their colleagues who were raped and murdered, despite 24-hour strike This is an appeal launched by the country’s largest doctors’ association.
Over the past week, doctors across the country have held protests, candlelight marches and refused to see non-emergency patients. 31-year-old graduate student murdered Around the early hours of August 9, the chest medicine department in the eastern city of Kolkata
Women activists said the incident at the British-era RG Kar Medical College and Hospital highlighted how women in India continue to suffer despite tougher laws since a 23-year-old student was gang-raped and killed on a moving bus in Delhi in 2012.
“My daughter is gone but now there are millions of sons and daughters with me,” the victim’s father told reporters late Saturday, referring to the protesting doctors. “His identity cannot be made public under Indian law. This gives me a lot of strength and I feel we will get something good out of this.”
India overhauled its criminal justice system after the 2012 attacks, including tougher sentences, but activists say the reforms have made little progress and not enough has been done to stop violence against women.
The strike by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), which ended at 6am local time (0030 GMT) on Sunday, had told Prime Minister Narendra Modi that since 60% of doctors in India are women, he needed to intervene to ensure hospital staff were protected by airport-like security protocols.
In a letter to Modi, it said: “All healthcare workers deserve a peaceful atmosphere, a safe workplace.”
‘Emergency services may be stopped’
The government has urged doctors to return to work to treat rising cases of dengue and malaria, while setting up a committee to propose measures to improve protection for health professionals.
IMA officials said most doctors have resumed their regular duties but Sundays are generally taken off for non-emergency purposes.
“Doctors have resumed their daily work. If the government does not take any strict steps to protect doctors, the next course of action will be decided by the government… We may stop emergency services this time as well,” said Madan Mohan Paliwal, head of the IMA in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh.
But the All India Joint Action Forum of Resident and Junior Doctors said on Saturday that the “nationwide shutdown” would continue and set a deadline of 72 hours for the authorities to conduct a thorough investigation and arrest the suspects.
Prabhas Ranjan Tripathy, vice president of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the eastern city of Bhubaneswar, said junior and trainee doctors had not yet resumed work.
“There were demonstrations today as well,” he told Reuters. “Others are under a lot of pressure because of the reduced manpower.”
The RG Kar Hospital has been rocked by riots and gatherings for over a week. Police banned gatherings of five or more people around the hospital for a week from Sunday and deployed police in anti-riot gear.
Kolkata Police Commissioner Vineet Goyal said in the order that meetings, demonstrations and processions were being stopped to prevent “breach of peace and disturbance of public tranquility”.
Reuters reporters saw no doctors at the usual protest site near the hospital entrance on Sunday as it was raining in the area.
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