As The Wire Science reported, resident doctors are protesting the nearly 50,000 vacancies created by a delay in postgraduate medical education counselling. This delay is in turn the product of a legal battle over the Center policy to have a 10% quota of all medical seats for individuals from economically weaker sections (EWS).
With these positions remaining vacant, resident doctors have been pushed to their breaking point in terms of workload – an additional layer to the many concerns that residents have raised for two years, including unpaid salaries, harassment and lack of protective equipment.
Their grievances can be traced to an underfunded public health sector, weak regulation of the private health sector and limited avenues for accountability and redressal. These issues have manifested at ‘micro’ scales across the country, resulting in a many protests by various occupational groups of health workers.
But even before COVID-19, protests by health workers in India were on the rise. The last several years have seen sustained action from health worker associations and unions:
across the country demanding fair wages and regularization of their cadre, by junior doctors against harassment and violence, by the Indian Medical Association and other groups on the National Medical Commission Act, and against state-level adoption/implementation of rules related to the Clinical Establishments Act.
In fact, according to the AILED database, India had the most number of protests by health workers – 479 – among 85 countries between March 2019 and March 2020. The next highest was Pakistan (281).
The pandemic’s onset fueled these long-standing grievances and also presented new ones, such as higher workloads and lack of safety equipment. Low-wage health workers, such as ASH As and resident doctors, were asked to bear many responsibilities in already poor working conditions.
From March 2020 to March 2021, there were approximately 431 protests around India – the third-highest in the world among 149 countries, after the US and France. In India, we found that the majority of these protests concerned working conditions and remuneration: unpaid salaries, poor management, contracts and regularization, and patient overload, followed by protests around lack of supplies and equipment.
Health workers resort to protests for a variety of reasons, and we would be remiss to say that these protests are solely on the grounds of working conditions. (Recall, for example, the protests earlier this year around ‘myopathy’ and concerns about private sector regulation.) What is clear, however, is most health workers are concerned about their rights as workers and their right to fair remuneration and decent working conditions.
Indian health workers are not alone in this fight. Of the nearly 7,000 health worker protests in 149 countries from March 2020 to March 2021, most were concerned with working conditions and remuneration.
Health workers have often faced uphill battles in having their demands met for myriad reasons, including complex governance structures. But the underlying problem is a lack of political prioritization for health workers’ basic needs. Numerous constituencies have been demanding improvements to the health sector by the state for decades. A key pillar of this is to ensure a well-supplied health workforce.
However, investment in India’s health system has been routinely criticized as hugely insufficient, the effects of which were apparent during the deadly second COVID-19 wave in 2021. Over decades, systems have not been built up to pay health workers sufficiently and on time, ensure the availability of equipment and supplies, guarantee proper benefits, and provide health workers with safe and respectful working environments.
You must be logged in to post a comment.