Truce at AIIMS, where doctors went on a flash strike on Tuesday night, seemed to be in the offing after health minister Anbumani Ramadoss on Wednesday promised to award them long-due degrees next month. The episode, however, has once again underlined the politics in the country’s most prestigious medical school, in the context of the running feud between the health minister and institute director P Venugopal.
Junior doctors struck work over the demand that over 700 medical students be given their degrees, which has been withheld now for about three years. The ongoing spat between Ramadoss and Venugopal, however, is the main reason for the administrative delay. Their feud even forced an intervention from the Supreme Court earlier this year. Owing to their differences, AIIMS hasn’t had a convocation ceremony for over two years now.
The decision to hold a convocation on September 25 was taken on Wednesday, after government managers intervened and directed the two to convene a meeting and thrash out the differences to end the strike.
In the meeting, however, it was suggested that the minister told the cardiac surgeon that there was “no need for resorting to gimmicks” as the doctors are “responsible to the public.”
Both sides have been trying to apportion blame on each other for the delay in awarding degrees to medical students who have passed out as doctors. Ramadoss, as president of the insitute, has refused to sign the degrees of medical students passing out as doctors charging that the certificates bear the signature of a person whose appointment has not been sanctioned by the AIIMS governing body. Ramadoss has contended that as per the last AIIMs governing body meet, VP Gupta was to continue as registrar. The certificates, however, are signed by Dr Sandeep Agarwal as registrar. On Tuesday, Ramadoss wrote to the AIIMS administration maintaining “it is not possible for me as president of AIIMS to append my signature to an illegal document”.
Agreeing that doctors are facing difficulty in the absence of original degrees in applying to foreign universities for higher studies, Ramadoss said on Wednesday, “my sympathy is entirely with the students and I would like to make the degrees available to them at the earliest.”