Govt. urged not to alter nurses' transfer policy

By Our Staff Reporter

PONDICHERRY, JAN. 12. Although it is the declared policy of the Administration that Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, French and English are the five languages for routine governance, the policy of the health department not to post nurses in the regions whose vernacular language is different from the nurses' mother tongue has drawn flak by the Federation of Health Employees Associations.

Addressing mediapersons today, the office-bearers of the Federation, Mr. Paul Surendran, Mr. Murugayyan, Mr. S. Govindaraj and Mr. K. Venugopal (a teacher), said all along the Administration had been following a practically laudable transfer policy under which a nurse had to serve for a year in Mahe or Yanam as the case may be or two years when posted in Karaikal. This arrangement had been a welcome measure and did not generally cause unrest among the staff. But one fine morning the Health Department had come out with the stand that no nurse would be posted in regions where the local language was different from the mother tongue of the nurses.

The office bearers said that nurses did not prescribe medicines or injections and were only carrying out the works assigned to them by duty doctors. Hence language component does not arise at all. Hence the transfer policy adopted so far expecting a staff to serve outside the headquarters should be followed and no subsequent measure should be taken to disturb the system.

If the government felt that no nurse should be posted outside their respective region, the yardstick should be adopted in respect of all sections of employees. Presently, Group D staff were shifted to other regions despite the practical difficulties these staff were facing in getting houses on rent in other regions. Pondicherry is a unique Union Territory having different liguistic regional constituents and hence the present short sighted policy of the health department was injurious to the basic cultural, liguistic and territorial features of Pondicherry.

Further, the office bearers asked, when nurses were brought back to Pondicherry as per the recent announcement of the Chief Minister that only on language basis should a nurse be posted or transferred, how some 12 nurses had not yet been brought back to Pondicherry from Mahe and Yanam regions. When nine out of 21 nurses were brought back with clear instructions that they should be relieved from their present places of work (Mahe) without waiting for substitutes, the same yardstick should be applied for the 12 remaining nurses. These nurses have been done injustice by the authorities, the Federation office-bearers alleged.

These 12 nurses have satisfied the conditions prescribed in the recruitment and trasnsfer rules that one should serve one year in Mahe or Yanam before being brought back to Pondicherry. The apprehension of the Federation activists is that if language basis should be adopted for posting a nurse, this would cause unemployment among the job seekers as they would have to wait till vacancies arose in their respective regions. For want of hands in the outlying regions locally, the Administration would be constrained to recruit candidates from nearby districts of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.

In support of the plea of the nurses who had completed the prescribed period of service in Mahe or Yanam and were done injustice, the staff would sit in fast on January 17 under the chairmanship of Mr. P. Venugopal, convenor of the families of the nurses facing injustice, in front of the hospital here.

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