Krishna Prasad case revives fresh round of north-south debate

Doctors associations contend that it was time Tamil Nadu persuaded the Centre and pulled out of the national pool and retains its 1,500-plus medical seats to itself so that medicos from here would not have to go to institutions in far off places such as Chandigarh, Ahmedabad and New Delhi where discrimination on linguistic and ethnic grounds have driven four of the students to suicide in less than two years.

Dr G R Ravindranath of DASE (Doctors Association for Social Equality) argued, “If the Centre provides reservation for OBCs in its all-India pool of 50 per cent PG seats, PG medical aspirants from here would not be forced to go to far off places, where they must interact with non-Tamil or Hindi and Punjabi and Gujarati-speaking patients who also lose their right to interact with native language-speaking doctors. The Tamil Nadu government should persuade the Centre to enact a law allowing it to opt out of the all India quota.”

Dismissing the alien language-problem factor as the cause for the suicides, Dr Ezhilan Naganathan of youth.org said, “Students from here have been taking tests and joining national institutes like PGI and AIIMS for over a decadeand-a-half, but why have Tamil Nadu medicos been dying only for a year-anda-half?” “Autopsy of deceased medico Saravanan from TN confirmed that he was murdered in AIIMS. What follow up action has been taken? Opening counselling cells or helpline will not solve the problem. It is a cartel targeting students from southern states and intimidating them not to come to institutes in north India,” he alleged. 

Language factor could not be presented at least in the case of Krishna Prasad who was doing PG in radiology. “Chances of him interacting with patients was minimal. Our north India classmates in MMC taught us that a dozen Hindi sentences were sufficient to interact with patients. Attributing language difficulty for suicides is unacceptable,” Dr Ezhilan said.