West Bengal: The doctor is not in

West Bengal, already struggling with an abysmal doctor-patient ratio (1:1,850), now faces a new threat that could well derail health services in the state: mass resignations by government physicians. As many as 85 doctors have quit in the past few months and some 350 others say they are planning to leave the service.

On March 23, seven organisations of doctors and allied professionals staged a demonstration at the health secretariat, Swasthya Bhawan, to demand protection from the assaults and political hooliganism in hospital premises, besides ending the "politicisation" of the state medical service. The protesters decried the Mamata Banerjee government's ambivalence despite over 100 incidents in the past year where doctors and other staff were assaulted in government hospitals and health centres.

Rezaul Karim, who heads the West Bengal Doctors Forum, says the government has not registered a single FIR, despite the Medicare Act, 2009, prescribing stringent punishment for any such attacks. Interestingly, after paying them no heed for a year-and-a-half, the chief minister invited the doctors' associations for talks on April 2. Banerjee's motives were clear. She couldn't afford a breakdown of the health services ahead of the panchayat elections. She promised them 4,000 additional police personnel as guards in hospitals, as well as CCTV cameras and signage spelling out the law to potential offenders.

The doctors, however, say it was the CM who kicked off the trend in February 2017, when she lit into private medical practitioners and hospitals, charging them with medical negligence and fleecing patients. They say this gave licence to her party henchmen as well as patients' relatives.

Notably, during her first term in May 2011, Banerjee had suspended a senior neurosurgeon, S.P. Gorai, for ticking her off when she visited the M.R. Bangur Institute of Neuroscience hospital with a large retinue of followers and reporters. Gorai remained under suspension till his retirement in March 2018 and even after that has been unable to claim pension benefits because his service book has, suspiciously, gone missing.

Another doctor, Arunachal Choudhury, was similarly punished with an unceremonious suspension on November 10, 2017, after a Facebook post alleging the state government was 'fudging' facts and figures in the dengue epidemic that hit the state. The mayhem is also discouraging recruitment. A recent West Bengal Directorate of Health Services advertisement to fill 300 vacancies found few takers.