From a Correspondent
JORHAT, September 21: The first batch of MBBS interns at Jorhat Medical College and Hospital (JMCH) who are on a one-year rotation service, have not been paid stipend for the last six months and have been forced to stage a silent protest by wearing black badges despite the fact that other MBBS interns of Gauhati Medical College and Hospital (GMCH), Assam Medical College and Hospital (AMCH) and Silchar Medical College and Hospital (SMCH) are being paid regularly. On Monday, JMCH MBBS interns announced their decision to close indoor services if their stipends were nor credited by midnight of September 21.
Talking to The Sentinel, the JMCH interns said, “Our internship at JMCH commenced from February 12 of this year after we completed our MBBS course. It is a one year compulsory service which we have to finish at all cost and without any kind of leave while working for the entire 365 days of a year. Unlike others we do not have fix allotted time and sometimes we tend to work for more than 16 hours depending upon any medical situation. We are a total of 90 interns of whom 37 are females and the rest are males. We are entitled to Rs 17,000 as stipend per intern per month and the last payment we received was Rs 25,000 on June 13 this year against our service that started from the month of February.”
“But that was the last payment and we still have to get the stipend for the last six months. Ever since our repeated pleadings fell into deaf ears we decided to silently protest against this exploitation from September 17 till midnight of September 21. But we have not discontinued our service as we understand the pain of a patient in need of medical intervention. In the meantime we have also submitted a memorandum to Sanjeeva Kumar, Principal Secretary, Health Department, Government of Assam, besides a copy each to the Principal and Superintendent of JMCH. However, the Principal of JMCH said that delay was imminent since JMCH has been newly established and the budget is being still looked over. Moreover, we also tried to meet the Deputy Commissioner but failed on every occasion and of late we met MLA Ra Goswami who promised us to look into the matter but he too told us about the poor state of affairs in the health department and the Assam Government in matters of fince. So we have decided to close indoor services though the OPD, Casualty and Labour room will keep functioning under our service for five more days till September 26. But even then if our demand for credit of stipend is not fulfilled then we will close service one after the other, starting with OPD,” added the interns.
JMCH sources have said that the demand of the MBBS interns was genuine as they were being subjected to compulsory service and without stipend. Whereas the total budget of the interns’ stipend of Rs 2.5 crore should have been initially fixed during budget review of the fince department, the same was not done by the authorities earlier when the first batch of the MBBS course started. However, close sources have revealed that after a last-minute meeting of JMCH authorities with the Treasury Officer of the Jorhat Treasury department, a decision had been taken to release stipend of the interns for the month of March.