Kerala house surgeons in self-financing colleges flag stipend issue

House surgeons in self-financing medical colleges have sought the government’s intervention so that they are paid stipend on a par with the amount paid to their counterparts in government medical colleges.

In a representation to Health Minister Veena George, the 2016 MBBS batch students of 23 self-financing medical colleges says despite a previous order of the government and a circular issued by the Kerala University of Health Sciences in 2016 that the students in private self-financing medical colleges be paid the same stipend as their counterparts in government medical colleges, none of the private managements have bothered to implement it. The house surgeons in government medical colleges are paid a monthly stipend of ₹25,000 whereas in private medical colleges, this ranges from ₹1,500 to ₹12,000. In many institutions, the students are paid much less than what the college managements claim they are paying as stipend on paper.

The students say that many of them, whose families were paying off huge educational loans, are in dire straits, especially since COVID began. They are only demanding that they be paid for the clinical duties they have been doing in COVID and non COVID wards.

The former Medical Council of India (MCI) had in 2019 brought out a public notice that all students pursuing compulsory rotating internship at the institution from which MBBS course was completed shall be paid stipend on a par with the stipend being paid to the interns of the State/Central government medical institutions. But this was never published as a gazette notification.

The stand of the new National Medical Commission (NMC), which replaced the MCI in September last year, weakens this position taken by the MCI.

The provision on internship and stipend in NMC’s draft regulations say that “all interns shall be paid stipend as fixed by the appropriate fee fixation authority as applicable to the institution /university/ State”.

K.V. Babu, a public health professional based in Payyannur, says draft regulations dated April 21, 2021 of the NMC on the issue of internship and stipend are vague and give ample opportunity for the private managements to deny stipend to MBBS interns.

“I have responded to the public notice inviting suggestions on draft regulations of the NMC. I have suggested that the provision on stipend be redrafted that the students of private medical colleges be paid stipend on a par with the amount being paid to the interns of the State/ Central govt. medical institutions,” he says.

He says that the Kerala High Court in 2015 had directed the PMS College of Dental Science and Research, Thiruvananthapuram, to pay BDS interns the same stipend as their counterparts in government dental colleges after the students approached the court.