Since March 2020, Sparsh Kumar has worked countless hours at Nerul’s DY Patil Hospital, doing the rounds of the Covid-19 wards at a time when the country has witnessed two waves of the pandemic, the second worse than the first. Nothing he handled, though, came remotely close to what his fellow doctor friend at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, experienced. His friend, along with other doctors, had gone on a strike in June 2019, to express solidarity with a doctor, who had been attacked by the relatives of a deceased patient. But, the protest went awry when the doctors were attacked by social workers with acid, bricks and country-made explosives. “He [Dr Kumar’s friend] locked himself in a room at the hospital and was continuously tweeting to be rescued. The goons had secured the whole area, so it was difficult for him to get out. I was in Mumbai reading minute-by-minute updates of the assault. I asked myself, am I in the right profession? Is it safe to be a doctor in India?” Dr Kumar, 30, says his friend had worked very hard for three years to secure a post-graduation medical seat. “After that incident, he was willing to give up on his dream.”

The Navi Mumbai-based doctor has been on COVID-19 duty since his post-graduation in surgery exams were postponed due to the pandemic. “Thankfully, I haven’t faced assault. But, who knows what the future holds? When I was an undergraduate student, I used to think that only the ill-informed take to violence. But I was proven wrong in 2016, when I was deployed as an RMO [resident medical officer] in the cardiology department at Fortis Hospital in Vashi. The entire ICU was vandalised by relatives of a patient over his untimely death. The intensivist was beaten black and blue, as we juniors hid on the first floor. None of the attackers seemed unschooled,” Dr Kumar says.