Docs demand raise in monthly stipend

Balwant garg

Tribune News Service

Faridkot, April 24

Around 100 junior doctors of Guru Gobind Singh Medical College and Hospital in Faridkot have sought the state government’s help as the amount they are getting for their job is less than the minimum wages fixed for the unskilled labour.

Demanding an increase in their monthly stipend, these junior doctors on Tuesday asked the state government and Baba Farid University of Health Sciences (BFUHS) to increase their stipend. We are getting a meagre monthly stipend of Rs 9,000. We are being paid the lowest stipend in the country and our daily wages were even less than that the unskilled labourer were getting, they alleged.

Under the Minimum Wages Act, a letter sanctioned by the office of Labour Commission, Punjab, vide circular number 7176, dated 5th April, 2017, the minimum rate of wages of a contractual worker is Rs 395.71 per day and Rs 10,277.52 per month month and we, double graduate trainees, first class gazetted medical officer working 24 hours, are merely getting a fixed number of casual leave, is not paid even such a minimum wage, alleged the doctors.

The stipend being paid to the intern doctors in government medical colleges in Punjab is the lowest in the country, they alleged, saying the stipend for MBBS interns, acknowledged as provisionally Registered Medical Practitioners by the Medical Council of India, is calculated at 40 per cent of the gross emoluments in the first year of service of a junior resident doctor.

There is a huge difference in the amount being paid throughout the country to the MBBS interns. Stipend in other states like New Delhi, Kerala and Karnataka is Rs 15,000, Rs 18,000, and Rs 20,000 per month, respectively.

The stipend to all medical students is paid for a one-year period of their compulsory internship after completion of their four-year and six-month academic course. During the internship, students assist in the running of the medical college hospitals.

Dr Raj Bahadur, vice-chancellor, BFUHS, said the stipend is fixed by the state government. “We will raise the matter with the state government to review the stipend amount to the intern doctors,” he said.

The stipend of all interns must get a minimum respectable amount of at least Rs 17,900 per month as recommended by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The stipend amount should get an annual hike of 5 per cent.

While there is about a 50 per cent increase in the tuition fee for MBBS students, there has been no increase in the stipend amount in the last five years. Interns are assigned all kinds of works from collecting blood samples to prescribing medicines to preparing OT charts, from bandage to dressing of severely affected wounds to applying plasters, from OPD busy hours to endless emergency nights. We are expected to do all this work with utmost efficiency but we are paid just Rs 300 per day, rued junior doctors.