RG Kar impasse: West Bengal junior doctors meet with senior officials again, to continue sit-in, 'cease work'

Kolkata: The senior officials of the West Bengal government on Wednesday had another round of meeting with the protesting junior doctors, who did not call off the cease-work stir even after Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee accepted their demand for the removal of Indian Police Service officer Vineet Goyal from the helm of the Kolkata Police.

The junior doctors have been on a cease-work protest over the past 40 days since the rape and murder of one of their colleagues at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital run by the West Bengal government in Kolkata. A delegation of the agitating medics had a two-and-a-half-hour-long meeting with Chief Secretary Manoj Pant and other senior officials of the state government at the state secretariat building in Howrah on Wednesday to follow up on their discussion with the state’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at her residence on Monday.

The junior doctors said before the meeting with the top bureaucrats that they wanted to discuss the issue of safety and security in the hospitals in the state. They also demanded clarity on the chief minister’s assurance for the formation of a task force. They said that they wanted to return to work but could do so only when their security would be ensured.

Sources said that the state government had accepted their demands for security at the hospitals and promised to introduce new measures soon.

The state’s Trinamool Congress government on Tuesday replaced Goyal with Manoj Verma, another IPS officer, as the commissioner of the Kolkata Police. Abhishek Gupta, who was Deputy Commissioner of Police (North), was also replaced by Dipak Sarkar. The state government also removed two senior officials from its Department of Health and Family Welfare.

The protesting doctors have been demanding the removal of the top cops for their failure to prevent cover-up attempts, destruction of evidence, and a proper investigation after the young doctor was found raped and murdered inside the seminar room of the Department of Chest Medicine on the third floor of the RGKMCH on August 9. They have also been demanding the removal of senior officials from the Department of Health and Family Welfare as they allegedly failed to root out corruption and the culture of intimidation prevalent in the public healthcare sector of the state.

Though the Supreme Court had asked the junior doctors to end their cease work stir by 5 pm on September 10, they had not returned to work and rather launched a sit-in demonstration in front of the Swasthya Bhavan, the headquarters of the Department of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of West Bengal in Kolkata.

Even after Banerjee had a meeting with them, accepted some of their demands, and removed the senior officials on Tuesday, the junior doctors, however, did not immediately end the sit-in demonstration in front of the Swasthya Bhavan. Neither did they announce till Tuesday when they would return to work.

With nearly 6000 junior doctors in over 20 government hospitals across the state not working, healthcare services across Bengal have been severely affected. The senior doctors, who had briefly joined the protest, returned to work later, but could hardly fill the void created by the continuing cease work stir by thousands of junior doctors. The protesting junior doctors, however, launched telemedicine services and free medical camps for patients.

Seven lakh outdoor patients and seventy thousand indoor patients had been denied medical care due to the cease work stir by the junior doctors over the past five weeks, according to the state government.

Over 7,000 surgeries had been deferred in the state government’s hospitals and 1,500 patients in catheterization laboratories had been left untreated. The state government had on September 9 informed the Supreme Court that 23 patients had died due to the lack of timely and adequate medical care during the cease-work agitation by the junior doctors.