Students, parents, medical college staff block traffic

Patiala, April 6

Students and their parents, along with staff members of the Gian Sagar Medical College and Hospital, blocked traffic on the Patiala-Rajpura road here today, following a meeting with the college management.

Since the faculty has halted work for the past almost one month due to non-release of their salaries for the past four months, except emergency services, all OPD services and teaching have been scraped, which has become a cause of concern for almost 500 MBBS students.

The parents today met the management asking it to get the classes resumed and also ensure that students are provided good facilities at hostels. However, the management in turn directed the teachers to either resume their duty tomorrow or threatened them of being termination.

Following the threat, students, parents and staff members blocked the traffic on the road. This is not the first time that the authorities have failed to disburse the salaries of staff for months together. There have been protests in the past also in this regard and the staff have been completely boycotting working causing inconvenience to patients.

The faculty had even submitted a memorandum to the Dean and Management on February 19 about their demands and said if they were not fulfilled by February 25, they would be forced to go on strike. Since the management did not take any action, the hospital staff went on strike and had been sitting on dharna since February 25.

Repeated meetings between the management and the faculty have yielded no results as the management is not able to fulfil its promises of dispersing the salaries of faculty and paramedical staff.

Moreover, several senior doctors have resigned in the past few months due to salary issues and worsening financial status of the institute management. On date, there is a shortage of faculty in every department of the institute as per the norms of the Medical Council of India. Meanwhile, Secretary of Medical Education and Research Department of Punjab Hussan Lal had got an enquiry done in this regard. — TNS