The functioning of nearly 600 primary health centres (PHCs) in the State might be hit from Wednesday onwards with the 507 contract doctors going ahead with their plan to stop work. Most of them work in two or three PHCs.
However, some doctors who are on emergency duty in isolation centres, ICUs and swab collection centres will continue working for some time. Although the Health and Family Welfare and Medical Education Ministers, along with the Chief Secretary and other top officials, met the doctors and assured them that they would be given weightage depending on the number of years of their service during direct recruitment and a few representatives who attended the meeting agreed, the Contract Doctors’ Association said refused to accept this assurance.
“The government has not given us a clear deadline by when the direct recruitment committee would be set up and when we would be considered for absorption. Also, when the Finance Secretary announced two days ago that the government would not go in for direct recruitment any more, how can we believe we will be considered?” asked Nithin Kumar, who works in a PHC in Hassan.
“As the meeting was called all of a sudden, only a few representatives who were closer to the city attended. All of us will come down to Bengaluru on Wednesday and submit our individual resignations en masse,” he said, speaking on behalf of the 507 doctors.
“While the government is citing the Supreme Court verdict in a case pertaining to Uma Devi, a Group ‘D’ worker in 2006 that said there are no rules to regularise a contract worker but it can be done if the government wanted, in Karnataka the process of regularisation began in 2007 and till 2017 over 2,000 contract doctors have been regularised. Only 507 of us have been left out and we want our regularisation also in a similar manner. The government has already called for applications for appointing 2,000 doctors,” he said.
“Most of the permanent doctors on roll with the Health Department now, are those who were on contract earlier and have been regularised,” he pointed out.
However, Medical Education Minister K. Sudhakar and Health Minister B. Sriramulu said their discussions with the contract doctors were fruitful. “We have decided to regularise the services of all the 507 doctors working on a contract basis,” Mr. Sudhakar said. “However, the regularisation is a process that has to be in sync with law. The government has to follow some procedures and guidelines in this process,” he pointed out. The State government last week hiked the salaries of the 507 contract doctors by ₹15,000 on the condition that they should not insist on regularisation and the doctors had refused to relent.
