The intern strike in J&K’s medical colleges is less about stipends than about a system that has quietly turned apprentices into its cheapest workforce.
The strike by medical interns across government medical colleges in Jammu and Kashmir has done what years of quiet complaint could not. It has forced the public to see how much of the state’s hospital care rests on the shoulders of its most junior doctors. Casualty wards and outpatient counters are feeling the absence, and that strain is itself the argument.
Administrators are right on the letter of the law. The compulsory rotatory internship is an academic requirement. An intern is a trainee, not an employee, and the stipend is meant to cover subsistence, not to match a salary. Nobody disputes that framework.
But the framework describes a hospital that does not exist. In wards running far beyond capacity, interns are not observers standing behind a consultant. They triage emergencies, draw blood, monitor patients through the night and handle the paperwork that keeps a ward functioning. Take them away and the system stalls. That is not what apprenticeship looks like. That is dependence on labour that costs almost nothing.
The conditions attached to that labour make the dependence worse. Shifts of 24 to 36 hours are common. Duty rooms are absent, unsafe or unfit to sleep in. Security is thin and basic hygiene is not guaranteed. A doctor in the thirtieth hour of a shift is a risk to the patient in front of them. Calling this a rite of passage does not make it safe medicine or sound teaching.
So the demands on the table are reasonable: a cap on continuous duty hours, secure and habitable rest rooms, working security arrangements, and a stipend reviewed against the actual cost of living in Srinagar and Jammu. None of this is radical. Most of it is already policy in better-run institutions.
The interns should also guard their own cause. Political parties have a habit of arriving at student protests with cameras and leaving with nothing settled. Once a dispute over hours and hostels becomes a partisan contest, the administration gets an excuse to dig in and the specific fixes disappear from the conversation. Student leaders will get more from a disciplined negotiation than from a rally.
The Health and Medical Education Department cannot wait this out. Warnings and circulars have not moved a single intern back to the ward and will not. What is needed is a structured meeting with intern representatives this week, a written commitment on duty hours and duty rooms, and a timeline for the stipend review. Each of these is within the department’s power today.
The state has built its emergency care on the endurance of people it refuses to call workers. It can keep pretending they are only students, or it can treat them well enough that they come back.
