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Television images showed thousands of doctors marching on Monday
to protest the incident at a government-run hospital, calling
for justice for the victim and better security measures,
paralyzing health services in West Bengal state.
The protest rippled nationwide on Tuesday, joined by more than
8,000 government doctors in the western Maharashtra state, home
to the financial capital of Mumbai, halting work in all hospital
departments except emergency services, media said.
In the capital, New Delhi, junior doctors wearing white coats
held posters that read, "Doctors are not punching bags," as they
sat in protest outside a large government hospital to demand an
investigation, Reuters Television images showed.
Thousands of patients were left stranded by similar protests in
cities such as Lucknow, capital of the most populous state of
Uttar Pradesh, and in the western tourist resort state of Goa
that crimped some hospital services, media said.
"Pedestrian working conditions, inhuman workloads and
violence in the workplace are the reality," the Indian Medical
Association, the biggest grouping of doctors in the country,
told Health Minister J P Nadda in a letter.
A health ministry spokesperson did not immediately respond to a
request for comment.
Doctors maintain their workplace environment is unsafe, even
after the weekend arrest of a police volunteer in Kolkata for
the doctor's murder, and the resignation of the principal of the
medical college where it happened.
City police chief Vineet Kumar Goyal told reporters a case had
been registered against the suspect under provisions of the law
relating to rape and murder.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters she
had given state police a deadline of Sunday to complete their
investigation, or she would hand it to federal agencies.
Emergency services stayed suspended on Tuesday in almost all the
government-run medical college hospitals in Kolkata, state
official N S Nigam told Reuters, adding that the government was
assessing the impact on health services.
Doctors in India's crowded and often squalid government
hospitals, who find themselves overworked and underpaid,
sometimes also end up bearing the brunt of violence by those
angered at medical services they see as falling short.
(Reporting by Subrata Nag Choudhary; Writing by Shilpa
Jamkhandikar; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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