Resident docs intensify stir, cops sent inside Safdarjung
New Delhi: Intensifying their stir over the delay in NEET-PG 2021 counselling, a large number of resident doctors on Tuesday protested on the premises of Centre-run Safdarjung Hospital, even as police personnel were deployed to ensure maintenance of law and order. The protest, a day earlier had taken a dramatic turn, as medics and police personnel had faced off in streets, with both sides claiming several persons suffered injury in the ensuing melee.
A senior police officer said security personnel have been deployed on the premises of Safdarjung Hospital to maintain law and order amid the ongoing strike by the doctors.
"Over 100 police personnel have been deployed. This is also to ensure the law and order situation at the hospital.
The situation is normal and under control as of now. The resident doctors are peacefully protesting here," a senior police official said.
Doctors chanted slogans like 'We want justice', and sought to bolster the morale of each other, after the face-off with the police on Monday went all the way to midnight as dramatic scenes were witnessed at the Sarojini Nagar Police Station.
The Faculty Association of Safdarjung Hospital condemned the face-off, while the resident doctors' association of AIIMS urged the government to reveal its plans for expediting NEET PG counselling, failing which it threatened to proceed with a token strike on December 29, including shutdown of all non-emergency services.
The stir, led by the Federation of Resident Doctors' Association, entered its 12th day on Tuesday, even as patient care remained affected at three Centre-run facilities — Safdarjung, RML and Lady Hardinge hospitals and some of the Delhi government-run hospitals.
FORDA on Monday had also said that several of its members were "detained" when they tried to hold a protest march from Maulana Azad Medical College (MAMC) to Supreme Court. FORDA president Manish had claimed that resident doctors of a large number of major hospitals on Monday "returned their apron (lab coat) in a symbolic gesture of rejection of services".
The Faculty Association of Vardhaman Mahavir Medical College (VMMC) and SJH on Monday had written to the Delhi police commissioner stating, it "strongly condemns and finds unacceptable, the cruel and inhuman manner, in which the protest of the resident doctors was mishandled by the Delhi police. The resident doctors were brutally assaulted by the Delhi Police."
In todays civilised world, it is a matter of shame that junior doctors who have been tirelessly working as the frontline Covid warriors for the last two years have been "treated so harshly", it alleged.
