Goats and Soda: NPR

On August 9, the body of a 31-year-old medical student was found in the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Calcutta. The woman had been raped and murdered.

The case has brought renewed focus to the discussion about women's safety in India – with women in the medical field in particular raising concerns.

“My first reaction was absolute horror. I could feel the anger in my bones,” says Dr Kamna Kakkar, a junior doctor from Delhi. “Hospitals are supposed to be safe places, revered like temples. When I put on the white coat to save lives, I expect to be offered safety.”

Their thoughts were shared by the seven doctors and nurses interviewed for this article – and are similar to points raised in two WhatsApp groups of over 200 medical professionals in India.

In addition to protesting for better safety measures for women, these medical professionals are also speaking out about the lack of respect they receive in their workplace. They say they are not safe at work and do not have safe places to rest when working shifts. They are also raising awareness about sexual harassment by colleagues and patients.

According to courts and police, the raped and murdered woman – whose name cannot be used by law – was found with serious injuries in the hospital's seminar room, where she was resting at the end of a 36-hour night shift. A volunteer police officer – an unpaid civilian recruited for minor police duties – was arrested in connection with the crime.

India’s Supreme Court comments

The brutality of this case, as well as the increasing frequency of reports of sexual crimes against women in India – from 25,000 rape cases in 2012 to 31,000 ten years later – have sparked nationwide anger and condemnation. In response, India's Supreme Court announced last Tuesday that it would hear the case in connection with the woman's murder and ordered the creation of a national task force to look into workplace safety for doctors.

The Supreme Court's decision was preceded by more than a dozen protests by medical professionals and thousands of citizens across India.

One of India's largest doctors' unions, the Indian Medical Association, is calling for tighter security measures for all hospitals – “at the level of an airport.” In a statement, they called for the deployment of more security personnel and video surveillance systems.

The infrastructure in most public hospitals is not designed with women's safety in mind, doctors told NPR. Female doctors usually don't have dedicated bathrooms or safe places to rest or sleep. “I know of one case where a female doctor had to sleep in the ward because she wasn't provided a duty room,” Dr. Kakkar said.

On August 16, following the Calcutta rape and murder, the association, which includes over 360,000 doctors, called a nationwide strike to demand safer spaces for medical professionals. The doctors who took part refused to treat non-emergency patients. Although exact figures were not collected, the Supreme Court appealed to the doctors to return to their jobs, saying their strike had denied medical care to Indians across the country.

A history of gender-based violence

Gender-based violence has long been a problem in India. According to a national health survey conducted by the Indian Ministry of Health, which covered nearly 725,000 women across the country, nearly one in three women in India have reported experiencing some form of violence.

New laws following a gang rape in Delhi in 2012 provide for harsher penalties for violence against women, including longer prison sentences and even the death penalty in rape cases. Still, the number of confirmed rape cases has risen from 337,922 in 2014 to 445,256 in 2022, the latest year for which data is available.

Passing more laws is not a solution, says Karanjeet Kaur, columnist for the Indian daily The pressure.

“In India, the problem has never been that the laws were misogynistic. The problem has always been the unequal application of those laws,” says Kaur. “Indian women have little hope, especially if they come from historically disadvantaged communities.”

This high-profile case has also drawn attention to India's low female employment rate, one reason for this being the lack of safety on the way to work and in the workplace. And yet the rape of a female doctor in a hospital was shocking, says Kaur, even though a 2015 survey found that around three-quarters of doctors said they had experienced violence at work.

Doctors, she says, “are seen as God’s next best thing,” and many Indians could also identify with the challenges she had to overcome on her journey to becoming a doctor, only to have her life “taken away so heartlessly and brutally.”

Ruchi Kumar is a journalist who covers conflict, politics, development and culture in India and Afghanistan. She tweets at @RuchiKumar