The Marathi Issue

The head-office bigwigs decided that all employees working for the corporation must have had Marathi as the higher language in their 10th Standard and should have passed in it. That was because the official language of communication was supposed to be Marathi I the state of Maharashta. A couple of political parties made an issue of it, and that was that. An unfortunate result of the decision was that all doctors employed had to have that qualification. A number of posts of doctors remained vacant because the doctors did not satisfy this condition. A state was reached when the medical council threatened to derecognize the institute due to deficiency of doctors. That there were not enough doctors to treat patients was entirely overlooked by the decision makers and also by the politicians who wanted votes of the Marathi speaking voters rather than from patients who were treated at the civic hospitals. I wonder if even the Marathi speaking voters will vote for them if they realize what harm is being done to them by the concerned politicians. And now we come to the funny part of it. We are supposed to be able to speak Marathi and read and write in Marathi so that we can treat our patients better. But a very large number of our patients don’t know Marathi. So when we communicate with them in Marathi, they either look at us uncomprehendingly, or just tell us they don’t understand what we are saying and ask us to speak in Hindi, their mother tongue. When that happened a number of times, I told them that doctors in employment of the corporation had to pass the standard 10 Marathi exam or their increments and promotions were stopped. New appointment of doctors who did not know Marathi was not allowed. If the doctors had to suffer all this for the sake of the patients, why were the patients not speaking in Marathi? They just smiled apologetically and waited for me to speak in Hindi and get on with their treatment. Then I realized I should not have asked them the questions. The poor souls had nothing to do with the injustice done to not-Marathi speaking doctors. It was not even injustice aimed at them. It was just a political move for garnering votes, and all these were unfortunate side effects of the same.