Nearly a fortnight after submission of chargesheet against three government doctors, including a teaching doctor in the Pipili rape and murder case, the doctors’ community in Odisha has now taken up cudgels to protect their tainted colleagues.
Threatening to go on cease-work, different associations of doctors are now demanding that the crime branch police should immediately drop charges against the three doctors, saying the provisions under which they have been charged are ‘illogical and arbitrary’.
The crime branch police, after repeated prod from Orissa High Court, on June 12 this year filed a supplementary charge sheet in the sensational case before a court at Pipili.
Demanding trial against SCB medical college and hospital superintendent D.N. Moharana and two other doctors of Capital Hospital in Bhubaneswar, Milan Mitra and K.C. Sahu, the crime branch sleuths accused them of neglect in treatment to the dalit girl involved i9n the case. They were booked under section 4 of SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
Terming the charges against the trio as ‘ridiculous’, members of Odisha Medical Teachers’ Association (OMTA), Odisha Medical Services Association (OMSA) and Junior Doctors’ Association (JDA) pointed out that the doctors treat a patient according to the symptoms and not according to caste.
“How charges of atrocities to a dalit patient can be made out against a treating doctor of a referral hospital when the concerned doctor has no scope to know the caste of the patient who is unconscious?” asked J.P. Biswal of OMSA demanding dropping of charges against Moharana, Mitra and Sahu.
Biswal claimed that adequate and proper treatment to the Pipili victim was given at the hospitals in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack when she was first brought to these hospitals in November last year.
Biswal also went on to endorse the controversial administration of anti-venom serum to the patient saying it is a practice among doctors to give AVS to unconscious patients anticipating that the patient might have been bitten by a poisonous snake.