Telangana: PG doctors write to authorities, file PIL seeking postponement of final exams

HYDERABAD: With less than a week left for their final year exams, at least four PG doctors who recently tested positive for Covid-19 — and many of their primary contacts — have reached out to health officials and the Telangana governor, appealing for postponement of exams. The PG doctors also filed PIL (public interest litigation) on Friday, as a last resort, hoping that the high court will intervene in the matter.

There are close to 370 PGs in OGH and over 200 in Gandhi Hospital who will be taking the exams slated from June 20 to June 29. While the four are currently isolated in Gandhi Hospital and Osmania General Hospital (OGH), some of their primary contacts are home quarantined. Worried that the might lose a year if they are not allowed to write the test, the PG doctors say that they have carried their books to the isolation ward, to prepare for the exams. Students are scared that conducting exams under such circumstances might result in a further spread of the virus among PG doctors.
“The students who tested Covid-19 positive, which include my close friends and colleagues, are under much greater stress. After the treatment at Gandhi they have been advised two weeks of home quarantine. It would be unfair to expect them to adequately prepare for and take the exams despite the ordeal they have undergone. It is the same for the primary contacts, many of whom left the hostels and the reading rooms after the outbreak of cases in the premises,” wrote Dr Syed Mustafa Hashmi, a final year PG doctor from the Osmania General Hospital saying how that the lack of clarity from the authorities have only added to their misery.
The fact that the Osmania and Gandhi hospital premises - both hotbeds of Covid-19 — will also be the exam centres with PGs writing the exam together , has also become a matter of concern. “There is no word about alternate arrangements being made for those affected, under treatment at Gandhi or under home quarantine. It is even unclear what happens to their primary contacts,” said another doctor. Meanwhile, the state health minister has already stressed that the exams will not be postponed. Speaking to STOI, vice-chancellor of the Kaloji Narayana Rao University of Health Sciences, Dr Karunakar Reddy said, “There is a PIL filed on the subject. The matter is now sub-judice.”