Striking Indian doctors to resume work after murder protest

Kolkata: Indian doctors on strike in Kolkata to protest the brutal rape and murder of a colleague will resume some duties from Saturday, the group leading the protests told AFP on Friday. The discovery of the 31-year-old doctor’s bloodied body at a state-run hospital in the eastern city last month rekindled nationwide anger at the chronic issue of violence against women.

While the protests and strikes have since calmed in the rest of India, regular demonstrations had continued in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state. “We will return to work in a graded manner from Saturday,” Aniket Mahato of the West Bengal Junior Doctors Front told AFP following late-night talks with authorities.
Junior doctors would return to emergency rooms in state-run hospitals, but would not resume their duties in outpatient departments, inpatient services or on planned surgeries, he said.He said the decision came following floods that have inundated parts of West Bengal in recent days.”It’s time to move and help the affected people,” he said.
Doctors had given the state government a seven-day deadline to implement measures enhancing security and safety in hospitals, Mahato said, adding they would stop work again if the demands were not met.

Tens of thousands of ordinary Indians joined in the protests following the August attack, which focused anger on the lack of measures for female doctors to work without fear.

One man has been detained over the murder, but West Bengal’s state government has faced public criticism for its handling of the investigation. Authorities eventually sacked the city’s police chief and top health ministry officials.

India’s Supreme Court last month ordered a national task force to examine how to bolster security for healthcare workers, saying the brutality of the killing had “shocked the conscience of the nation”. The gruesome nature of the attack has invoked comparisons with the 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman on a Delhi bus, which also sparked weeks of nationwide protests.