NEW DELHI, February 24: Senior doctors of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) today agreed to end their 16-day-old strike following an assurance by the Delhi High Court that their interests would be protected.During the hearing of a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking direction to the Union government to ban the strike, the counsel of the AIIMS' Faculty Association assured the division bench of acting Chief Justice Devinder Gupta and Justice Mukul Mudgal that the senior faculty members will resume work from tomorrow.While assuring the senior doctors that their interests would be protected, the court, in turn, said that an appropriate interim direction to the government would be issued tomorrow. During the course of arguments, the court also took the government to task for sitting over the Bakshi committee report for over a year and asked the government counsel Rakesh Tikoo to state the reasons why the committee's recommendations were not implemented.Though the bureaucrats got the Pay Commission recommendations implemented soon after the commission report was made public. The government seemed indifferent toward the doctors for doing the same, the judges observed, adding that the government should understand what is the level of intellect required to run an institution like AIIMS.``The level of intellect is much higher than that of a bureaucrat and the government should make sure that it is retained,'' the court added. Rakesh Tikoo however reasoned that though the government was ready to give higher salaries to senior doctors, it was feared that such an act would generate similar demands at other levels.Rekha Palli, counsel for the AIIMS Faculty Association, in her plea before the judges, demanded that the faculty association be consulted by the government before taking any decision on new pay scales.The faculty members, who have agreed to end their strike from Thursday, are anxiously waiting for what the High Court decides for them tomorrow.``The High Court has promised to give a direction to the Government tomorrow on our pay scales. We found this assurance very positive,'' faculty member Bir Singh said.Asked if they would resume the strike if the directive was not to their satisfaction, he said that such a possibility was very much there. ``But we have faith in the court. The public interest petition - though perhaps filed in collusion with the Government - came as a blessing in disguise,'' he said.He said that the doctors who would begin work from Thursday morning would face a huge backlog of cases and investigations. ``We will have to work harder though the Government may not pay us for the days we were on strike,'' he said. ``But our work has never been dictated by what we received from the Government,'' he said.
