It’s literally payback time for undergraduate and post-graduate medicos who participated in the medical strike for 63 days that crippled health services at Osmania and Gandhi Medical Colleges.
To make striking junior doctors own up responsibility and also to prevent them from taking up similar agitations in future, authorities have made it mandatory for MBBS students to submit an affidavit duly signed by parents and two gazetted officers. The MBBS students have to take an oath in writing that they will not participate in similar strikes in future and also accept that they were part of the strike between last September and November.
Authorities have also decided to ask Post Graduate (PG) medicos to make up for the lost time. The PG medicos, who spearheaded the strike and have lost attendance because of it, will now have to work for two additional months, which were lost during the strike period. The regular duties of PG students were supposed to end by May, but they would have to put in two additional months.
On their part, MBBS students have maintained that it was getting difficult for them to get signatures from two gazetted officers, who are not from health departments, to sign the undertaking. While medicos are uncomfortable, health authorities maintained that the affidavit was a necessity. A majority of MBBS students from Gandhi and Osmania Medical Colleges have only 40 to 30 per cent attendance due to the medical strike. To appear for their upcoming exams, it’s mandatory for them to have an attendance of 75 per cent.
“We are sending their affidavits to the Health University so that it can waive off the 75 per cent rule and make all of them eligible to appear for exams. We have asked parents to sign because we wanted to make students more responsible for their decisions,” top health authorities maintained.
