KOLKATA: Indian doctors on strike in Kolkata to protest the brutal rape and murder of a colleague will resume some duties from Saturday, the group leading the protests told AFP on Friday.
The discovery of the 31-year-old doctor’s bloodied body at a state-run hospital in the eastern city last month rekindled nationwide anger at the chronic issue of violence against women.
While the protests and strikes have since calmed in the rest of India, regular demonstrations had continued in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state.
“We will return to work in a graded manner from Saturday,” Aniket Mahato of the West Bengal Junior Doctors Front told AFP following late-night talks with authorities.
Junior doctors would return to emergency rooms in state-run hospitals, but would not resume their duties in outpatient departments, inpatient services or on planned surgeries, he said.
He said the decision came following floods that have inundated parts of West Bengal in recent days.
“It’s time to move and help the affected people,” he said.
Doctors had given the state government a seven-day deadline to implement measures enhancing security and safety in hospitals, Mahato said, adding they would stop work again if the demands were not met.
Tens of thousands of ordinary Indians joined in the protests following the August attack, which focused anger on the lack of measures for female doctors to work without fear.
One man has been detained over the murder, but West Bengal’s state government has faced public criticism for its handling of the investigation.
Authorities eventually sacked the city’s police chief and top health ministry officials.
India’s Supreme Court last month ordered a national task force to examine how to bolster security for health care workers, saying the brutality of the killing had “shocked the conscience of the nation.”
The gruesome nature of the attack has invoked comparisons with the 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman on a Delhi bus, which also sparked weeks of nationwide protests.
Striking Indian doctors to resume work after murder protest
https://arab.news/8mwtz
Striking Indian doctors to resume work after murder protest
- The discovery of a 31-year-old doctor’s body at a state-run hospital in Kolkata last month rekindled nationwide anger at the chronic issue of violence against women
- While the protests and strikes have since calmed in the rest of India, regular demonstrations continued in the eastern city, which is the capital of West Bengal state
Almost 60 percent of Kyiv without power as Russian strikes shatter grid
- Many of Kyiv’s residents have been living in cold apartments with only a few hours of electricity a day
- “Nearly 60 percent of the capital is without electricity,” Zelensky wrote on X
KYIV: More than half of Kyiv is still without power a day after Russian strikes on energy facilities, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday, as Ukrainians struggle through a bitter cold snap.
Many of Kyiv’s residents have been living in cold apartments with only a few hours of electricity a day — or sometimes none at all — since a recent surge in Russian attacks on a grid battered by nearly four years of missile and drone strikes.
“As of this morning, about 4,000 buildings in Kyiv are still without heat, and nearly 60 percent of the capital is without electricity,” Zelensky wrote on X.
The temperature in the capital was minus 12 degrees Celsius (10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday morning, although it climbed slightly by the afternoon.
Some residents complained on social media of being without electricity or heating for more than a day.
In the eastern region of Kharkiv, where the energy system has also been heavily bombarded, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said 520,000 consumers were without power on Wednesday, down on Tuesday’s figure of more than a million.
He said Kharkiv region’s energy infrastructure was attacked again on Wednesday.
In the southern region of Odesa, energy company DTEK said one of its facilities had been badly damaged in the morning, depriving several thousand households of power.
Even when some power is restored to households, they face rolling blackouts for most of the day, as a significant chunk of Ukraine’s power generation capacity has been taken out by Moscow.
The outages have seriously affected Ukraine’s cellular services, with the CEO of Ukraine’s largest mobile provider Kyivstar saying that just under 10 percent of their grid was not working.
