Kerala Medical College Hospital docs to hold strike on March 3 over pending dues

The doctors will be marking March 3 as ‘cheating day’ and said that a protest will be held outside the District Medical Officer’s (DMO) office.
KGMCTA protest
KGMCTA protest
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Doctors at the Kerala Medical College Hospital will be on strike on March 3 to protest the non-payment of their allowances and salaries, which, they say, have not been paid properly for the past few months. The doctors will be marking March 3 as ‘Cheating Day’ and have announced that a protest will be held outside the District Medical Officer’s (DMO) office to seek their pending dues.

The doctors have said that they will also be going on an indefinite strike from March 3 and VIP duty, pay ward duty, non-COVID-19 and non-emergency meetings will be boycotted. They clarified that the strike will not affect OPD services.

The doctors have said that if by March 10, their demands are not met, they will be carrying out a candlelight march and will stage a protest outside the Kerala Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram. They added that if their demands are still not met March 17, then they will boycott OPD services and elective surgeries and treatments.

Dr S Binoy, State Secretary of the Kerala Government Medical College Teachers Association (KGMCTA), and Dr Nirmal Bhaskar, Secretary of the Association have said that the doctors have not been paid their allowance arrears from July 2017 to June 2019. The doctors have said that the state government had agreed to pay them allowance from 2017, but only paid them since June 2019. They have missed two years’ worth of payments, the doctors have said.

The doctors have also expressed concern about salaries of new doctors as well as entry cadre, and the frame of career advancement promotion. They have demanded that the government sort this out as well.

Earlier, the doctor associations had issued a statement alleging that the Kerala government is insulting doctors by not paying their pending allowances and salary. The statement added that when the government provided salary hikes and other allowances to employees in other sectors, the doctors, who neglected their own life to save citizens of the state during the pandemic, were given minimal allowances, which was “an insult to the community”.

When the doctors were about to start an indefinite strike earlier too, Health Minister KK Shailaja had held a negotiation meeting in which they were promised the salary hikes and allowances, and were asked to postpone the strike.

"But that was a trick by the government to save their face. Another meeting was also held with the Health Minister and Finance Minister TM Thomas Isaac. They promised to meet our demands," the statement said, adding that the government has “forgotten” that when they received many awards for COVID-19 management, it was also the result of the hard work of over 2,000 doctors from the Medical Colleges.

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