More than 300 MBBS students from the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Medical College and Hospital in Chennai’s KK Nagar have been protesting since Tuesday, May 23, against the recently announced faculty transfers as they would result in a considerable shortage of teaching staff. According to ESIC’s annual transfer order, 36 faculty members are being transferred out of the Chennai campus but only 27 faculty members are being transferred in, creating a shortage of 9 teachers.
The students, who entered their second day of protest on Wednesday, told TNM that they would continue to protest until the transfer order is revoked. Arsath, a final year MBBS student, said, “Transferring 36 faculty members in the middle of an academic year and not replacing all of them will affect our academics. This is the first time that the student body is facing such an issue and we are peacefully protesting against it.”
On May 20, ESIC had ordered an annual general transfer of 213 doctors who teach at ESIC’s medical colleges in Tamil Nadu, Kolkata, Karnataka, New Delhi, Haryana, Mumbai, Telangana, Rajasthan and Bihar. All the transfers set to take place across the campuses in the aforementioned states are disproportionate, since the numbers of outgoing faculty don’t match the numbers of incoming faculty members. Arsath explained, “Several campuses on the list are getting 100% replacement of their faculties and some campuses which have vacancies are getting additional faculty members. But we are among those colleges which will suffer because we will be short of teachers soon."
The campuses in Chennai’s KK Nagar, Bengaluru’s Rajajinagar, Kolkata’s Joka, and Kalaburagi’s Kalnoor are the most affected since each of the campuses is to suffer a shortage of 9, 14, 15 and 10 faculty members respectively.
Further, students also said that the patients who frequently visit the ESIC medical hospital for treatment were also supporting their protest. Devi, a patient who has been undergoing treatment at the hospital's orthopaedic department for the last six months, expressed fear that the transfers could lead to problems of language barrier between doctors and patients. “Most of the existing doctors are able to speak Tamil with patients who are local residents. The new doctors who are going to come here might not speak Tamil, and we don’t know English or their mother tongue to communicate our medical history with them,” she said.