1000 JIPMER employees arrested for road blockade

Puducherry, Sep 20 (UNI) About 1000 employees of the centrally administered JIPMER hospital were arrested when they attempted to obstruct a road here today.

The employees, who are on an indefinite strike since September 8 to protest against the Centre's move to grant autonomus status to the medical institution gathered inside the JIPMER campus. Police arrested the JIPMER employees inside the hospital premises as they along with JIPMER anti-conversion peoples action committee volunteers moved towards the main road.

Besides JIPMER employees, CPI(M) Tamil Nadu state council member T Murugan, AIADMK state secretary A Anbazhagan, MLA, and another AIADMK legislator Om Sakthi Segar, Mr Leon of the RPI and representatives of the confederation of Pondicherry state government employees were arrested.

While the medicial services continued to be affected for the 13th day today, the JIPMER administration managed to restore partial service with skeleton staff.

The JIPMER administration today suspended five more striking employees.

In a release, JIPMER Director K S V K Subba Rao said the second additional munsif court here had granted permanent injunction restraining the staffs from conducting any agitation within the hospital campus and the violation of the court orders would amount to contempt of court.

He said in the show-cause notice dated September 11 issued to the employees, it was reiterated that violation of the court order restraining the staff members conducting agitations inside the campus would lead to contempt of court. The notice also warned of the consequences of illegal strike and violation of the court injunction.

Ignoring the warnings, the employees have failed to report for duty, Dr Rao said and appealed to them to report on duty to avoid initiation of contempt of court proceedings, in addition to other such action as may be initiated under the rules.

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