Ayurveda Practitioners Not Entitled To Same Remuneration As MBBS Doctors: SC

NEW DELHI: Ayurvedic doctors working in government hospitals in India are not to be considered on an equal footing as MBBS-trained doctors and should not get similar remuneration, according to the Supreme Court of India.

A 2012 Gujarat High Court decision granting Ayurvedic practitioners equal pay was overturned by the SC decision.

Although MBBS doctors treat hundreds of patients during outpatient days (OPD) in ordinary hospitals in cities and towns, the court ruled that although Ayurveda doctors are significant, they do not undertake work of a comparable value.

The SC bench of Justices Pankaj Mithal and V. Ramasubramanian made it clear that AYUSH practitioners are not permitted to help in difficult procedures or conduct post-mortem exams.

They said, “Allopathy doctors are required to perform emergency duties and to provide trauma care. By the very nature of the science that they practice and with the advancement of science and modern medical technology, the emergency duty that Allopathy doctors are capable of performing and the trauma care that they are capable of providing, cannot be performed by Ayurveda doctors."

The Supreme Court panel referred to OPDs where doctors see hundreds of patients and said, “We cannot be oblivious of the fact that both categories of doctors are certainly not performing equal work to be entitled to equal pay."

The court also observed that although every alternative medical approach has a distinguished history, practitioners of indigenous systems of medicine do not typically execute intricate surgical procedures.

"We have no doubt that every alternative system of medicine may have its pride of place in history. But today, the practitioners of indigenous systems of medicine do not perform complicated surgical operations," they said.

The bench stated that it was neither the court's duty nor its province to judge the relative merits of these two medical science systems.

The decision is in response to several challenges by petitioners who sought to contest the 2012 Gujarat High Court verdict, placing Ayurvedic practitioners at a par with MBBS doctors, although both streams of medicine are different in approach and remedy.

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