RG Kar Medical College is a 138-year-old institution with a rich history and several eminent alumni. It is present within a sprawling 26-acre campus in the heart of the city of Kolkata. Yet, it required the brutal rape and murder of a doctor there in the midst of a busy bustling hospital for everyone to know that there is no female duty doctor’s room within the emergency building. The victim doctor had to go to a secluded seminar room to get some rest. If there was a safe space for women within that emergency building, we wouldn’t be seeing the situation today.
Kolkata is a city that I love despite its warts and consider myself an honorary Bengali. My three years living and working in the city have shaped me into the person I am. I did my residency at the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology, Kolkata. In my first year of residency, we realized to our chagrin that female residents did not get posted for night duties.
The reason was that there was only a single room for the residents to sleep during the night. There was no separate room for female residents. The male residents had to sometimes escort the female residents to the ladies' hostel before starting their duty.
In later years, when the proportion of male residents reduced, the hospital was forced to put female residents on night duties. But that too was useless, as most of the cases that used to come in an eye hospital at night were drunk men who had got injured. A male resident or a male RMO had to see the patient first.
At the time I was a disgruntled idiot who harped on and on about this unfair treatment of male residents. But I now understand the several layers of fear under which women doctors have to operate under in government hospitals.
I do not mean to imply that Kolkata or my alma mater is any different from any other big city or government hospital in those cities. My experience with both have been happy memories. This incident could have happened in any city and in any government hospital, so let’s not single out either as a root cause analysis.
In the last few days, it has been heartening to see young doctors and many others take to the streets of Kolkata with several medical associations in several cities following suit. I know in my heart that this is not going to change anything.
Governments will make new committees who will then recommend new laws with more stringent punishments “if convicted”. The arrested perpetrator or perpetrators will either go scot-free after a few years because of “lack of evidence” linking those persons to the crime or would be “encountered” like in the Hyderabad rape-murder case a few years ago.
This would satisfy the blood-lust of the masses- as I have seen several posts from colleagues and friends these last few days. Then everything would go silent and things would move on as usual. However, this would not change the ground reality of unsafe public spaces for women and not just women healthcare workers in their workspaces.
