'Give us our pending salaries': Civic body-run hospitals’ doctors go on mass leave in Delhi

NEW DELHI: Senior doctors of North Corporation-run hospitals went on a day-long casual leave en masse on Monday as the crisis over pending salaries of medics of civic-run facilities deepened with no resolution in sight, officials said.

R R Gautam, president of the Municipal Corporation Doctors’ Association (MCDA) on Monday said, “If our demands are not met, we will go on indefinite strike from tomorrow.” 

The MCDA, an association of senior permanent doctors of the civic hospitals, was established in 1974 and has about 1,200 members. It also includes doctors from hospitals run by other two municipal corporations.

The MCDA on Saturday had issued a statement and threatened that its members from NDMC hospitals would go on a mass casual leave if their pending salaries of the last three months were not released.

The association already has given sufficient time to authorities concerned to resolve the issue and pay our salaries, “but they have not done anything to solve the problem, and instead they appear to be unconcerned with the plight of doctors,” it had said.  

The MCDA had recently threatened to go on an indefinite strike from October 19, but it had later decided to defer the strike in “public interest”.

“The first decision taken in the General Body Meeting was mass casual leave by all senior doctors of the NDMC on Monday.

And total strike for indefinite period of all senior doctors from Tuesday, if salaries of all doctors, including resident doctors are not released by Monday, and if a permanent solution like handing over MCD health services to the central government, is not decided,” the MCDA statement said.

The authorities are to be held “solely responsible for this unprecedented strike, as they are neither bothered about their doctors — so-called ‘Corona warriors’ — nor are they concerned about patients. 

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