Young doctors refuse to call off strike, demand new…

The West Bengal Junior Doctors Front, which is protesting the rape and murder of a doctor at a Kolkata hospital, has emailed the state secretary seeking another meeting as some of its demands have not been met yet.

After the meeting with the protesting doctors on Tuesday, the West Bengal government accepted some of their demands, including the resignation of the Kolkata police chief and two senior health officials.

“There have been repeated attempts to politicize our cause, false accusations of seeking positions of power instead of justice, and attempts to create divisions among us through emails, audio clips and to smear our movement. Yesterday, in a long conversation with the Honorable Chief Minister, our five-point demands were discussed, and some of them were partially fulfilled,”

The Junior Doctors Front reported this in a press release issued on Tuesday. The Junior Doctors Front also criticized some provisions in the “Aparajita Act”, which proposes to abolish night shifts for doctors.

“The deep-rooted misogyny and medieval mentality behind the state’s ‘Aparajita Act’ have been laid bare before the Supreme Court. It has been made clear that imposing restrictions like disallowing night shifts and restricting day shifts to less than 12 hours creates a divide between men and women and such interference in their freedom cannot provide real security for women,” Junior Doctors Front said.

Following the meeting with the doctors, Dr Kaustav Nayak and Dr Debashis Halder were on Tuesday removed from their posts as director of medical education (DME) and director of health services (DHS) in the Department of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of West Bengal.

Besides these changes, the Director of the Institute of Health and Family Welfare, Dr Suparna Dutta, and Joint DHS, Dr Swapan Soren, have also been removed from their posts.

According to the notification issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Nayak will assume the post of director of the Institute of Public Health and Family Welfare and Haldar will assume the post of officer on special charge of public health at Swasthya Bhawan.

The body of the 31-year-old doctor was found on August 9 at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. Since then, thousands of junior doctors in the state have been on strike.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DNA staff and is published by ANI)