Doctors in India go on strike after assault, murder of colleague

Hospital services have been disrupted in several Indian cities since Tuesday after a doctors' protest spread nationwide following the sexual assault and murder of a trainee medic in the city of Kolkata, authorities and media said.

Thousands of doctors marched on Monday in Kolkata and the surrounding West Bengal state to denounce the killing at a government-run hospital, demanding justice for the victim and better security measures.

The 31-year-old doctor was found dead on Friday. Police said she had been sexually assaulted and murdered; a police volunteer was subsequently arrested in connection with the crime.

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, the 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.

A high court in Kolkata ordered that the criminal investigation be transferred to India's federal police, the Central Bureau of Investigation, indicating that the authorities were treating the case as a national priority.

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.