PUNJAB'S DOCS STRIKE:Total irrationality

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

The ham-handed administrative action that the Punjab government has taken against the striking young doctors may potentially create more complications and could have better been eschewed, though. But the doctors too have been decidedly on a wrong path. After receiving a hefty raise in their emoluments and other concessions for better service conditions a short while ago, they should have focused on their job of serving the sick humanity. Sadly, instead they went for sacrificing the sublime ethics of their noble profession for individual greed and collective avarice. Sickeningly, the bonanza whetted their appetite for minting money, not for serving the humankind. No matter how magnanimously one views their demands, each comes across as deeply flawed. Their very demand for recruitment of medical officers directly in grade 18 is wholly fraught. It indeed smacks of demanding a privileged position for the medical graduates that is absolutely unjustifiable by every canon known to the public services the world over. No lesser years of rigorous education and training the engineering graduates go through. But in the government job, their first entry is, at best, in grade 17. Even the postgraduates selected for the superior services go through a tough drill of written tests, interviews and years-long training in services academies. And the first posting they see is in grade 17. So what is that impels the young doctors to demand the entry of medical officers at a higher grade? It stands no logic. And it makes no sense. And the same goes for their other two demands. Indeed, the huge outlay involved in fixing stipends of post graduate trainees equal to medical officers' pay and enhancement of health professional allowance equal to basic pay would neatly siphon off the provincial public treasury. Not that the provincial hierarchs have been very meticulous with the handling of the public finances. They have been not. They have blown away like smoke stupendous public monies on cheap pork barrel like sasti roti folly and laptop contrivance. But two wrongs do not make one right. Bluntly, with their weeks-long strike the young doctors have simply played with the health and lives of the ailing public. And they have done it callously. The bulk of patients that the public health facilities these doctors have been working on draw are poor and destitute people. They have no money to procure expensive private treatment. For this strike, some have even died for lack of medical aid. And a lot more have seen deterioration in their health and ailments. It was really unbearably painful to see them in an extremely pathetic predicament the young doctors' strike had driven them into. And it indeed is stunning, to say the least, that even their doleful plight did not soften up hearts of the striking doctors. Having said that, the conduct of Punjab chief minister in the whole imbroglio cannot be condoned either. After the striking doctors wanted to talk directly with him, he should have condescended to take time out of his tenting farce and meet them. Being the province's chief executive, he could have talked credibly and authoritatively with them, convinced them of the difficulties involved in meeting their demands and persuaded them into calling off their strike. But he matched his own intransigence with their intransigence irrationally. Governance, he didn't realise, is not haughtiness and arrogance, but humaneness and humblessness. It is not irrationality or intransigence either. It is understanding and sagacity. Anyway, the emergency measures that the Punjab government has taken to keep the state health facilities operational will, at best, provide only transient relief. No permanent cure they could be. A long-lasting solution has to be found. The fire that the doctors have touched off with their strike may be doused for the time being. But reignite it would in time definitely, given the human greed what it is. Talking has to be done with the striking doctors to lay to rest for all times to come the demands that they have voiced. For that, a climate conducive to purposeful and meaningful dialogue has to be created. Accordingly, the provincial government must eschew extreme administrative punitive measures against the striking doctors. On their part, the doctors must see the irrationality of their demands and scale down to embrace a civilised method of dialogue to find a mutually-acceptable way out. Strike by the government at the doctors and strike of the health facilities by the doctors must anyway be off.