Mumbai: Seven students packed into a room meant for four. Students from different disciplines fighting for the same in-campus facility. Hostel rooms with peeling paint and mouldy ceilings on the verge of collapse. The accommodation problems plaguing the government-run medical colleges in the city are serious but the authorities aren’t lending an ear.
For the past few months, 250 resident doctors—130 from KEM Hospital and the affiliated GS Medical College and 120 from Topiwala National Medical College and BYL Nair Hospital—have been on tenterhooks about their accommodation. The doctors have been living in a MHADA building in Bhoiwada in Dadar East for the past couple of years but since this was a pandemic-time concession, MHADA has now asked them to vacate. Intervention from the civic authorities afforded them a two-month extension, which too, will end soon.
In one of the on-campus hostels of KEM Hospital, nursing students and resident doctors are vying for the same space. After a part of the ceiling in the trainee nurses’ hostel fell on a staffer on November 3, the students staged multiple demonstrations.
“They were first given the option of moving to the premises of the TB Hospital in Sewri, which they refused due to health concerns. The authorities then asked the female resident doctors to go there instead,” said Dr Prashanth GN, general secretary of the hospital’s unit of the Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (MARD).
The order, however, was problematic, since resident doctors are on call round the clock. In the event of their moving, the female doctors would need to walk back to the off-campus accommodation at odd hours which would compromise their security. Currently, both the female resident doctors as well as the nurses have refused to move, leading to a stalemate.
At Lokmanya Tilak Municipal Medical College affiliated to Sion Hospital, there are 650 post-graduate students working as junior resident doctors. Here, every dorm room has double the occupants it can hold. Rooms meant for two are currently housing four while rooms with the capacity to hold four have seven occupants.
“In May-June, a new batch of PG students is expected to join us, which means there will be four PG batches at the same time. It will be very difficult to accommodate them all within the current space,” said Dr Pravin Dhage, the MARD representative from the hospital and president of the BMC Hospitals MARD Association.
Dr Dhage pointed out that the hostels were considerably decongested during Covid, as doctors were provided extra accommodation in a MHADA building at Pratiksha Nagar nearby. “This also helped us isolate during the pandemic. But we had to vacate that building four months ago,” he said. The resident doctors from Sion Hospital have already sent a request to the authorities to find alternative accommodation ahead of the arrival of the new batch.
The situation at the Grant Medical College/JJ Group of Hospitals hostels was so bad that the state human rights commission had taken suo motu cognisance of media reports about it. Other than the moldy walls and leaky ceilings on the verge of collapse, the electrical wires in the hostel were exposed and hanging low. The entire hostel floor was strewn with garbage, with broken furniture stacked in the corners of the stairwells.
The last hearing of the case in the commission was on November 2, at which time the authorities and public works department were ordered to immediately start on repair work in the hostels.
Dr Dhage said the root of all the problems was the fact that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had not done much by way of upkeep or upgradation of the living facilities of resident doctors. “Additionally, despite the number of PG seats increasing every few years, there has been no increase in the facilities to accommodate everyone,” he said.
Additional municipal commissioner Dr Sanjeev Kumar acknowledged that resident doctors in all the hospitals were facing issues with their accommodation facilities. “Renovation and upgradation work is underway in some of the places. We are building new hostels but they will take a couple of years to be completed,” he said. In the meantime, he added, the BMC was trying to arrange for alternate accommodation for the doctors.