PG Medicos not Getting Full Stipend by Mahadevappa Rampure Medical College: RTI Activist demands police investigation
Kalaburgi: Alleging that postgraduate medical students are not being paid a full stipend by Mahadevappa Rampure Medical College, run by Hyderabad Karnataka Education Society (HKES), for the last several years, a Right to Information (RTI) activist has demanded police intervention in this matter.
Activist Sharanabasappa Ambesinghe has demanded that the Kalaburagi Police should take cognisance of the issue, register a case against the college authorities and conduct an investigation into the alleged irregularities.
Taking up the issue, Mr. Ambesinghe recently addressed a press conference in Kalaburagi and produced a memorandum written by the PG medical students to the president of HKES, the trust running the medical college, with a demand for regular payment of stipend.
As per the latest media report by The Hindu, the first-year PG medicos belonging to the concerned college get Rs 45,000 stipend, whereas the second-year and third-year students get Rs 50,000 and Rs 55,000 respectively. However, the RTI activist, Mr. Ambesinghe alleged that even though the stipend is shown as fully paid on paper, the students, in reality, are getting only a fraction of it.
It has been alleged by him that even though the college deposits the amount of stipend in the bank account of the PG medicos, later it withdraws the amount from their account through cheques collected from all of them in advance.
Therefore, even though the PG medicos are not paid full stipend, the college has it on record to prove that the students are being given proper amount of stipend on a regular basis.
He alleged that every month, the college has shown to credit Rs 45,000 stipend for each of the first-year students. However, later Rs 37,000 is withdrawn from their account.
Similarly, Rs 40,000 gets allegedly withdrawn from the account of second-year students who get Rs 50,000 as stipend. In case of the third-years, after paying Rs 55,000 as stipend, the college debits Rs 43,000 from each of their accounts.
During the Press Conference, Mr. Ambesinghe further alleged that a complaint in this regard was made against the college highlighting the irregularities in the payment of stipend for the PG students on February 8. However, police failed to register the case yet, informed the RTI activist.
Medical Dialogues had last year reported about the glaring disparities in the amount of stipend paid to the Undergraduate and Postgraduate medical students across the country.
As per the data regarding the students admitted through the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test Postgraduate (NEET-PG) examination 2022, which is available on the official website of the Commission, there were glaring disparities in the stipend paid to the Junior Resident doctors across the institutes in a state and also across the country.
The data revealed that the minimum amount of stipend (Rs 20,000 or less than Rs 20,000 per month) is paid to the resident doctors pursuing their postgraduate medical education in medical colleges located in States like Karnataka, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.
Meanwhile recently releasing the final Post-Graduate Medical Education Regulations, 2023 (PGMER 2023), which were published in the official Gazette on 29.12.2023, the National Medical Commission (NMC) introduced uniformity in the amount of stipend paid to the PG medicos in a particular State/UT.
The Commission specified that the PG medicos who are pursuing degree, diploma or super-speciality courses should be paid a stipend at par with the stipend being paid to the PG students of Government institutes, in that particular State/UT.
This is a major relief for all the PG medicos since they have been demanding a uniform stipend policy for a long time. There have often been complaints from the resident doctors of private medical institutes that they are paid a meager amount of stipend, compared to the stipend being paid in the Government institutes.
Also Read: Uniform Stipend for all PG Medicos in a particular State, UT: NMC
