Interns Deserve Parity

The eight-day strike by medical interns across Jammu and Kashmir has ended, but the relief should be read for what it is - a temporary truce, not a resolution. Interns have agreed to resume duties after the Government promised to finalise a long-pending stipend revision within thirty days. That the matter needed a strike at all, rather than the Government's own initiative, says a great deal about how such genuine grievances are handled. It is true that medical interns are, technically, still students rather than employees. But this distinction has always sat uneasily with reality. Interns staff emergency wards, assist in surgeries, manage patients through the night, and quite literally keep hospitals running. Their labour is indistinguishable from that of any junior healthcare worker, even if their designation says otherwise. To treat them as mere trainees while relying on them as frontline staff is to have it both ways.

What makes the delay harder to justify is that the Government had already accepted the case for a stipend hike, having constituted a Stipend Enhancement Committee as far back as June 2023. Two years on, interns were still waiting for that recommendation to translate into an actual order. Meanwhile, the cost of living has climbed steadily. Regular Government employees receive periodic pay revisions and dearness allowance adjustments as a matter of course. Interns, curiously, are left out of this cycle altogether, expected to manage on a stipend of around twelve thousand rupees a month - a sum that barely covers basic expenses today. When counterparts in several other states draw more than double this amount, and even the Central Government has set its own benchmark stipend, the demand from Jammu and Kashmir's interns is neither excessive nor unreasonable. It is simply parity.

Equally troubling was the Administration's response while talks were still underway. Issuing show-cause notices to intern representatives, invoking clauses on professional misconduct and threatening suspension of internship, was heavy-handed and counterproductive. Raising a grievance through legitimate means is not indiscipline, and hospital authorities would do well to avoid such actions in future, as they only harden positions rather than resolve them. Better sense has now prevailed, with the Government's assurance and the interns' decision to stand down. The onus now lies squarely with the Government to act within its own timeline. Patients must not be made to suffer disruptions again, and interns must not be made to wait indefinitely.