Medical services hit by strike, PM says quota matter settled

New Delhi, May 25 (UNI) Medical services remained crippled across the country today as doctors struck work in support of medical students opposing reservation for OBCs in higher education, even though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh insisted that the matter was settled and asked them to call off the strike.

Emergency services functioned in most hospitals, but the out-patient departments had to be shut down in several places.

While units of the Indian Medical Association obeserved a ''medical bandh'' against the reservation policy, the faculty association of the prestigious AIIMS in New Delhi went on a mass casual leave.

The Delhi Medical Association joined fasting medical students at AIIMS today on a day-long hunger strike and a sit-in.

In the national capital and several cities like Jaipur, Bikaner and Simla traders downed shutters expressing solidarity with the medicos.

The protestors who have been agitating for the past two weeks intensified their stir after the government announced on Tuesday that it would go ahead with the proposed 27 per cent quota for OBCs in institutes of higher education.

They have now vowed they will not back off until the government considers their demand for a review of the decision and setting up of a judicial committee to examine caste-based reservation policy.

The striking doctors and medical students meanwhile met President A P J Abdul Kalam seeking his intervention to break the deadlock over the OBC reservation issue, and urged him to convene a meeting between Dr Singh and them.

''We appealed to the President to call the meeting. We want the meeting to happen in his presence so that all the aspects are taken care of,'' Mr Binod Patra, AIIMS RDA president and the leader of Youth for Equality, the organisation spearheading the anti-reservation campaign, said after a 12-member delegation met Dr Kalam and submitted a memorandum.

However, Dr Singh, at a press conference in Srinagar today said the matter was settled since the Parliament had ratified the 93rd constitutional amendment providing for reservations and the UPA-Left Coordination Committee had already sketched out a roadmap of the proposals.

He reiterated his appeal to the protestors to call off their agitation, but said he was ''not averse'' to meeting any group.

Dr Singh pointed out that any proposed reservation would apply only by June next year and said there was plenty of time to discuss any problem that might arise.

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