Kolkata doctor’s rape and murder at hospital sparks concern in India

Early Friday morning, a 31-year-old female intern doctor was resting in a conference hall after a tiring day at one of India’s oldest hospitals.

That was the last time anyone saw her alive.

The next morning, her colleagues found her half-naked body on the podium, with multiple injuries. Police later arrested a hospital volunteer in connection with what they said was a rape and murder at Kolkata’s 138-year-old RG Kar Medical College.

Tens of thousands of women in Kolkata and across West Bengal are expected to join the ‘Reclaim the Night’ march at midnight on Wednesday, demanding “independence to live in freedom and without fear”. The march comes ahead of India’s Independence Day on Thursday. Outraged doctors have been on strike in both cities and across India, demanding a strict federal law to protect healthcare workers.

This tragic incident once again raises the alarm about violence against medical staff in this country.

Women wearing makeup nearly 30% of India’s doctors and 80% of nursing staff. They are also more vulnerable than their male colleagues. Official data shows a worrying problem. Crime against women increased by 4% in 2022, with more than 20% of these cases involving rape and assault.

The incident at a Kolkata hospital last week has exposed the alarming security risks faced at many state-run health facilities in India.

At RG Kar Hospital, which sees more than 3,500 patients a day, overworked interns — some working 36-hour shifts — have no private restrooms, forcing them to take breaks in a conference room on the third floor.

Reports say the arrested suspect, a patient volunteer with a troubled past, was given unrestricted access to the ward and was caught on CCTV. Police allege that no background checks were carried out on the volunteer.

“The hospital has always been our first home; we only go home to rest. We never thought that the place could be so unsafe. Now, after this incident, we are extremely scared,” said Madhuparna Nandi, a junior doctor at the 76-year-old National Medical College Kolkata.

Dr Nandi’s journey highlights the plight of female doctors in India’s public hospitals who are forced to work in conditions that compromise their safety.

At the hospital where she worked as an obstetrics and gynecology resident, there were no separate restrooms and toilets for female doctors.

“I use the patients’ or nurses’ toilets if they allow me. When I work late, I sometimes sleep on empty patient beds in the ward or in cramped waiting rooms with beds and sinks,” Dr Nandi told me.

She said she felt uneasy even in the break room after a 24-hour shift, starting with outpatient duty, continuing to visiting duty and the maternity ward.

One night in 2021, during the height of the Covid pandemic, several men burst into her room and woke her up by touching her, demanding, “Wake up, wake up. Meet our patient.”

“I was completely shocked by the incident. But we never thought it would get to the point where a doctor could be raped and murdered in a hospital,” said Dr Nandi.

What happened on Friday was not an isolated incident. The most shocking case remains Aruna Shanbauga nurse at a major hospital in Mumbai who was left in a persistent vegetative state after being raped and strangled by a medical worker in 1973. She died in 2015, 42 years later, suffering severe brain damage and paralysis. More recently, in Kerala, Vandana Das, A 23-year-old intern was stabbed to death with surgical scissors by a drunk patient last year.

In overcrowded public hospitals with unrestricted access, doctors often face angry mobs from patients’ relatives after a death or a surge in immediate demand for treatment. Kamna Kakkar, an anesthesiologist, recalled a harrowing incident during a night shift in the intensive care unit (ICU) during the 2021 pandemic at her hospital in Haryana, northern India.

“I was the only doctor in the intensive care unit when three men, brandishing a politician’s name, barged in, demanding a highly sought-after controlled drug. I gave in to protect myself, knowing that the patient’s safety was at stake,” Dr. Kakkar told me.

Namrata Mitra, a pathologist in Kolkata who studied at RG Kar Medical College, said her father, a doctor, often accompanied her to work because she felt unsafe.

“During my shift, I brought my father along. Everyone laughed, but I had to sleep in a room tucked away in a long, dark hallway with a locked iron gate that only a nurse could open if a patient came in,” Dr. Mitra wrote in a Facebook post over the weekend.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I was scared. What if someone in the department — a caregiver, or even a patient — tried something? I took advantage of the fact that my father was a doctor, but not everyone has that privilege.”

While working at a public health centre in a district of West Bengal, Dr Mitra had to sleep overnight in a dilapidated one-storey building used as a doctors’ dormitory.

“From dusk on, a group of boys would gather around the house, making lewd comments when we came in and out of emergencies. They would ask us to check their blood pressure as an excuse to touch us, and they would peek through the broken bathroom window,” she wrote.

Years later, during an emergency shift at a public hospital, “a group of drunk men walked past me, causing a commotion, and one of them even groped me,” Dr. Mitra recalled. “When I tried to complain, I saw the policemen asleep with guns in their hands.”

Things have gotten worse over the years, said Saraswati Datta Bodhak, a pharmacist at a government hospital in West Bengal’s Bankura district. “Both my daughters are junior doctors and they told me that hospital campuses in the state are infested with anti-social elements, drunkards and touts,” she said. Dr. Bodhak recalled seeing a man with a gun roaming around a top government hospital in Kolkata during a visit.

India lacks strong federal laws to protect health care workers. Although 25 states have some form of law to prevent violence against them, convictions are “almost non-existent,” RV Asokan, president of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), a doctors’ organization, told me. A 2015 IMA survey found that 75% of doctors in India have faced some form of violence in the workplace. “Security in hospitals is virtually nonexistent,” he said. “One reason is that no one thinks of hospitals as conflict zones.”

Some states like Haryana have deployed private security forces to beef up security at government hospitals. In 2022, federal government States were asked to deploy trained security forces to sensitive hospitals, install CCTV cameras, set up rapid response teams, restrict entry of “undesirable individuals” and file complaints against violators. Apparently, nothing much happened.

Even doctors who protest seem pessimistic. “Nothing will change… The expectation is that doctors will work around the clock and endure abuse as the norm,” Dr. Mitra said. It’s a disheartening thought.