NEW DELHI/ KOLKATA: India’s top police agency Wednesday took over investigations into the brutal rape and murder of young medic, a killing that has sparked outrage and fellow doctors to go on strike. The 31-year-old woman’s brutalized body was found last week in a state-run hospital in West Bengal’s Kolkata, where she was a resident doctor. A subsequent autopsy confirmed sexual assault and homicide. In a petition to the court, the victim’s parents have said that they suspected their daughter was gang-raped, according to Indian broadcaster NDTV.
While police have detained a man who worked at the victim’s hospital helping people navigate busy queues, officers have been accused of alleged mishandling of the case. Kolkata’s High Court on Tuesday transferred the case to the elite Central Bureau of Investigation to "inspire public confidence”.
Hospital services were disrupted in several Indian cities on Tuesday as thousands of doctors protested the murder. Doctors marched on Monday in Kolkata and the surrounding West Bengal state to denounce the killing, demanding justice for the victim and better security measures. Protests spread on Tuesday, with more than 8,000 government doctors in the western Maharashtra state, home to the financial capital of Mumbai, halting work in all hospital departments except emergency services, media said.
In the capital, New Delhi, junior doctors wearing white coats held posters that read, "Doctors are not punching bags,” as they sat in protest outside a large government hospital, Reuters Television images showed. Similar protests in cities such as Lucknow, capital of the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, and in the western tourist resort state of Goa hit some hospital services, media said.
"Pedestrian working conditions, inhuman workloads and violence in the workplace are the reality,” the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the biggest grouping of doctors in the country, told Health Minister J P Nadda in a letter released before they met him for talks on Tuesday. IMA General Secretary Anil Kumar J Nayak told the ANI news agency that his group had urged Nadda to step up security at medical facilities.
The health ministry did not immediately comment. Emergency services stayed suspended on Tuesday in almost all the government-run medical college hospitals in Kolkata, state official N S Nigam told Reuters, adding that the government was assessing the impact on health services. Doctors in India’s crowded and often squalid government hospitals have long complained of being overworked and underpaid, and say not enough is done to curb violence levelled at them by people angered over the medical care on offer. — Agencies