Close to 50 medicos from the Government Homeopathic Medical College, Ramanthapur are on strike for the last four days demanding release of their stipends, pending from February, 2013 to June 1, 2014, worth over Rs. One crore. With the stipends pending before bifurcation, medicos said that, neither officials from AP nor Telangana were willing to pick up the tab and release arrears.
Thanks to the boycott of duties by medicos, the daily outpatient inflow in the hospital, which ranges between 450 and 500, and services to nearly 100 in-patients admitted in the hospital have taken a hit. “We have met our department officials from both States but they are unwilling to take initiative to release stipends. It’s as if, both do not want us,” the medicos rued.
This is not all, the college house surgeons (doing one-year internship after their UG course), are yet to receive stipends worth Rs. 11.5 lakh. “Our repeated efforts to reach out to department officials have elicited no response. On an average, each medico has to receive anywhere between Rs. 3 and Rs. 4 lakh towards arrears,” medicos said.
The junior doctors pointed out that since over a year they have been paying from their own pockets for boarding and lodging facilities in Hyderabad. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to bear the expenditure on our own. The average stipend for medicos is between Rs. 18,000 to Rs. 20,000 per month. Our demands are just and we don’t have many options left but to boycott duties and our classes,” the protesting medicos said. In AP and TS, Ramanthapur homeopathic hospital is the only Government College offering PG specialisation. There are only 18 PG homeopathy seats and every year, there are three batches of students with a total strength of 54 out of which 49 are regular while the rest are in-service candidates.
