Govt junior docs not paid stipend since six months

Hyderabad: Junior doctors in state government hospitals have not received their stipends for periods ranging from four to six months, putting them to all sorts of hardships.

A member of the Telangana Junior Doctors Association (JUDA) said there are around 4,000 junior doctors in the state. Stipends are pending for all of them for up to six months. The annual stipend of Rs 6 lakh was stopped because tax was being deducted from it. Now the issue has been resolved and TDS (tax deduction at source) would not be done, but the stipends have still not resumed, he said.

One more issue is that after a strike by JUDA in 2021, the officials had agreed to hike the stipend by 12 per cent last year, as per the rule, but it hasn’t been done yet.

Another JUDA member said they had recently met the Director of Medical Education (DME) over the issue and the latter had assured that payments would be disbursed from the next week. “It has been very difficult for us. The average age of most junior doctors is 27 or 28 and a lot of them have families too. We have been forced to depend on others almost on a daily basis and also take loans. If stipends are not paid by next week we have to think of an action plan to put pressure,” the junior doctor said.

Meanwhile, senior resident doctors are facing the same problems. About three weeks ago, all 698 senior resident doctors in the state went on a strike and boycotted both outpatient and emergency services as they, too, had not received their stipends for periods ranging from three to seven months.

They ended the strike after health minister T. Harish Rao and DME Dr. K. Ramesh Reddy had agreed to their demands.