The Gujarat government has announced that doctors serving under a bond in various government medical facilities in the state will be given a salary hike of Rs3000 per month. With this, class 2 medical officers in such institutes will now get a monthly pay of Rs63,000. Health Minister Nitin Patel said the raise was for doctors serving under a bond. In Gujarat, medical students sign a bond at the time of admission to serve for a year in rural areas after completing their post-graduate degrees. Many of the junior doctors had in the first week of August gone on strike to demand better pay. The protest had erupted after the government ended the COVID duty for such doctors and they were asked to report to duty in rural areas. Earlier when the COVID cases were surging, the government, to encourage more doctors to serve in COVID wards had introduced a scheme where doctors under bond could serve in COVID wards. Each day served in a COVID ward would be counted as two days of bond service. This effectively meant the doctors could serve six months in a COVID ward and have their 1-year mandatory rural service bond eliminated. But as the COVID cases declined there was no need for doctors in COVID wards and so the government reverted to the old systems where doctors had to serve in rural areas.Most of the protesting doctors were from government hospitals in Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Surat, Bhavnagar and Vadodara among others.
