Chaos at hospitals: Young docs deserve a better deal

TThe NEET exams were postponed because of the pandemic, unlike say elections, and then when finally held and results declared, a moratorium was imposed on counselling over legal scrutiny of EWS criteria

he immortal philosopher and Telugu poet Baddena Bhupaludu, over eight centuries ago, advised migrants going away for better opportunities to look for a doctor or healer in a place before considering settling down there. A place is as rich, safe, happy and liveable as it has a vaidya, or doctors. His simple adage of wisdom also has a didactic instruction of profound substance — a society must treat its doctors as gods, as those who delicately stand between illness and good health, between death and life. Doctors have, deservedly, received the highest respect in every civilisation, culture, country and society worthy of any respect.

In India too, since time immemorial, we have chronicles of how kings to common folk have held the healer in highest regards and echelon of society. But modern India, like other paradoxes it contains, has easily learnt to despise that which it must love, treat with contempt those who we must respect — from women to the learned — we so easily can profess to worship those whom we treat in the worst, most unfair fashions.

Young doctors having to come out on to the streets to protest for the fairest of demands which is not a case of their enlightened selfinterest but that of everyone else — seeking a continuum in national and public healthcare resource building — by ensuring the next batch of post-graduate medical students enter the system — would seem needless in the healthiest of times.

That young bright doctors of India have to take to the streets and wish to march to the Supreme Court, seeking a closure to the issue of counselling to the next batch of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), at the yearend of two years of an ongoing global health crisis and pandemic, at the possible onset of an inevitable next wave of rising cases, is bizarrely Kafkaesque.

The NEET exams were postponed because of the pandemic, unlike say elections, and then when finally held and results declared, a moratorium was imposed on counselling owing to the legal scrutiny over a change in annual income limits by the government to define the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) eligibility, thus shifting the entire burden of a series of misses on the current batch of young doctors.

These doctors, working the hardest of times during the peaks of pandemic, have had no replacement or replenishment of staff, have been overworked, are stretched to the seams physically and emotionally, and are the same people we, as a nation and people, stood up to pay our respects to on the calling of our Prime Minister Modi as frontline warriors.

With greater ease than flipping a coin, we had male cops dragging marching female doctors off the streets to police stations, manhandling them. Young doctors breaking down, crying, loudly wondering why they ever chose the noblest of professions, is not a sight a modern India needs.

Let us address their concerns immediately. Let legal wrangles not disturb continuity. Let the process of deciding on right and wrong have an onus of declaring outcomes within timelines. The prescription is clear — let us respect our young doctors. Without them, we won’t be a liveable country.