Give The Docs Their Due

State Health Minister Digvijay Khanvilkar needs to think through his position on the pay and emoluments of resident doctors more carefull...

State Health Minister Digvijay Khanvilkar needs to think through his position on the pay and emoluments of resident doctors more carefully. It is absurd to argue as he does in an interview to this paper that doctors working in badly-equipped hospitals deserve to be paid more than those who work in better-run institutions. This is evidently not what happens in real life and it sounds suspiciously like a justification for paying low stipends to Mumbai8217;s residents. He then produces another untenable argument.

Residents are being trained and will move on to highly paid positions, some of them may emigrate to America. Here the minister seems to want to deny the doctors any sympathy they might earn for being worse paid than Central government resident doctors and worse paid even than residents in benighted Bihar. Unfair tactics. Khanvilkar is on firmer ground when he argues that the government has no money. That is only too true as everyone knows.

But then again how has the very same government found thewherewithal to pay a bonus to its own employees? It is sadly a complicated issue. It is difficult to get a fix on fairness in a matter that involves so many conflicting interests: doctors, governments, poor patients, comparative rates across public and private sectors and across different states with different financial problems. Resident doctors are being trained after all and do get the benefit of working in a public hospital. They will not get that kind of valuable experience anywhere else. Second, medical education is heavily subsidised.

It seems reasonable to demand that the beneficiaries get stipends or emoluments below the market rate, which is in fact the case. But MARD makes a comparison with Central government resident doctors who allegedly get four times as much as Mumbai8217;s. That kind of gap cannot be justified and is patently unfair. The general practice is for state government salary and wage levels to rise with every rise at the Centre.

So why should resident doctors be excluded from thisprocess? It is a knotty issue, not one to be settled by careless answers from a minister. Mumbai awaits an expert committee8217;s opinion.