New GMCs’ Staff Issues

It is a matter of serious concern that hundreds of non-gazetted employees of new GMCs in Jammu and Kashmir have been made to work for years without service or recruitment rules governing their careers. That it has taken a full-blown agitation, disrupting medicare services across five districts, to finally extract an assurance from the Administration speaks volumes about the non-serious approach of the Health and Medical Education Department towards its own workforce. The GMCs at Kathua, Rajouri, Doda, Anantnag and Baramulla were established between 2018 and 2019. Seven years on, the employees who keep these institutions running - lab technicians, pharmacists, medical social workers, nurses and clerical staff - still do not know under what rules they will be promoted, regularised or evaluated. The absence of these rules has not been a mere administrative inconvenience; it has directly stalled career progression, denied due promotions, and entrenched a pay structure markedly inferior to that of the older, established GMCs in Jammu and Srinagar. That identical posts carry different pay levels depending on which GMC an employee happens to work at carries no justification.

Equally troubling is the state of staffing itself. The sanctioned strength of NG employees in these colleges remains substantially unfilled - some hospitals are functioning at barely half their approved staff numbers even as bed capacity and MBBS intake have expanded sharply. Two other new colleges, Udhampur and Handwara, have gone a step further, running technical posts entirely on contractual arrangements. This is not administrative streamlining; it is the exploitation of the region's trained youth, who are made to shoulder the responsibilities of permanent positions while being denied the security, pay and prospects that should come with them.

Healthcare cannot be treated as an ordinary service delivery function. It demands skilled, committed personnel working under conditions that allow them to actually serve patients - not workers preoccupied with the uncertainty of their own careers. A nursing staff far stretched, as reported at these very institutions, is a patient-safety issue as much as an employee-welfare one. The Government's latest assurance-that recruitment rules will be framed within a month-is a welcome step. The Administration must treat this deadline as final, not another entry in a long list of postponements. Framing the rules, filling vacant posts, and correcting pay anomalies with the older GMCs are overdue obligations to the people who have kept J&K's newest hospitals functioning through the pandemic and beyond.