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Rajasthan hit by govt employees' strike

Kamla Bora in Jaipur

The Rajasthan government employees' strike has started to affect the man on the street badly.

The impact is most evident in essential services like medical, health, water and sanitation. Courts have also been paralysed.

Services in the government hospitals have been reduced to bare minimum. The normally overcrowded wards are now near-empty and doctors are attending to only emergency cases in the absence of nursing and technical staff.

Patients have either been discharged or left on their own. Many have been forced to approach private hospitals.

Even the state's biggest hospital, the Sawai Man Singh in Jaipur, wears a deserted look. Ram Avtar of Jhunjhunu town, who brought his mother for an operation here last month, is still waiting.

"I don't know when the operation will be performed. Doctors say that it is not an emergency case and your patient can wait till the strike ends," says Avtar. "Those who can afford have been shifted to private hospitals. But where can poor people go?"

The government is trying to run skeleton services in hospitals aided by under-training nurses, but all diagnostic services are closed.

With the sweepers of all municipal bodies joining the strike, heaps of garbage have started piling up in cities and towns, where sewer lines have also started choking and overflowing. The efforts by the local administration to clean garbage by using contract labourers failed when they refused to do the job in the face of violent protest from strikers.

The drinking water supply in major towns and cities is erratic, although it is not as bad as it was in the earlier phase of the strike when the strikers disrupted the supply system.

Judicial officers are disposing off only urgent matters. They mostly hand out new dates for hearing in old cases. Many courtrooms have been locked since the staff have walked out.

Retail shopkeepers, milkmen and vendors are the other sections of society who have been hit hard by the employees' strike, as the agitators who are not getting salaries are unable to pay their dues.

The local media reports a fall of up to 60 per cent in retail trade. The fall is particularly in grocery items, cosmetics and electronics goods.

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