Hopes End When the Money Stops

The bare minimum that anyone would expect while starting a new job would be to

-          1) Get paid.

-          2) Get paid regularly on time every month.

What you learn after transitioning from a student to employee is that this bare minimum is often far from guaranteed. I learnt this lesson the hard way back in 2019, when despite working almost nonstop most of the year, I barely had a couple of months’ salary to show for it by the end.

Private Hospital Shenanigans

It was my last month of internship. It was obvious that I needed a job. Fast. My father was bedridden and taking care of him cost quite a bit of money every month. We had very little in terms of savings, so it was a very urgent situation.

Suddenly transitioning from the youngest in the house to the one who has to shoulder all of the financial responsibility for keeping things afloat within the span of a year was a difficult transition that I had to make.

So, when my college offered me a job as a medical officer in the ER, it was a comfortable choice to make. It’s always comfortable to stay in familiar surroundings. At least at the time. And it wasn’t like I was well aware of other options either.

And for a while, things were okay. It was there that my interests in Emergency Medicine, the branch that I eventually got into, first began to grow. But that good phase was short-lived. The hospital was running into a financial crisis as a result of bad management and the powers that be had an idea on how to effectively cut costs

-          Stop paying doctors.

They had their own logic. Of all the employees, doctors would likely be the most able to tolerate missing salary for a few months. Most were affiliated to multiple institutes and had more than one source of income. Sure, there would be complaints, resentments and eventually some would leave. But they would be replaced by others and cycle would continue. This is of course not a good way to run a good hospital but that wasn’t a priority for years by that point.

Unfortunately, I was not one of the doctors who could afford to not get paid. So, when the money stopped coming in the early months of 2019, the pain was instant. Requests and complaints were met with apathy and disdain. I should have cut my losses early and left.

But I was advised by others to stay on in the hope that pending amounts would eventually have to be cleared. So I stayed on in hope. I was doing 60 hours per week and not getting paid. I then moved to start locum duties in other hospitals which offered pay after each duty just to pay the bills. So, it quickly became working 7 days a week and not getting paid for the most of it, which is a huge physical and psychological strain. And the pending payments never came.

I could have sought legal help but I didn’t have the finances or the personal support to go through that route. Like a fool I stayed on for months until a job as a medical officer in the NRHM came up. The sad part was that I still remember how emotional I was on my last day there. It was my college since 2012 and a toxic relationship had formed. Something that cost me 4 months of pay when I had barely anything to begin with.

What I understood was that they wanted to get rid of me and the easiest way was to stop paying me until I quit.

I would learn just how petty the administration there had become a few weeks later when they refused to give me an experience certificate and claimed there was no proof I had even worked there.

Government Bureaucracy

Picture me as I start my first job in the government sector. Besides the trepidation that comes with the sudden transition from private to government, I extremely optimistic about finally getting a job with nice, regular and predictable monthly pay. Or so I thought.

Of course, I had no idea that I was going to a hospital with an accounts section handled by a certain Mr Benny. The hospital was in a rural area and this had apparently been a “punishment posting” for Mr Benny in view of his incompetence.

One month turned into two and then three. My first government salary had still not arrived. I had enquired with Mr Benny multiple times and his explanation never really made sense. I went to head office in the city. I had even gone to the finance department itself.

The hospital was around 35-40 km from my home. Travelling to and fro was a task, for morning 8 am duties I had to leave at 6:30 am (and considering I was rarely late those days, this is a sort of discipline that I probably don’t have in me anymore now that I’m in my 30s). Returning after evening duties was often after 10 pm. It wasn’t really possible to go to extra hospitals anymore.

Tick-tock. The month ends, the bills arrive. Suffocation builds. I have been working without pay but neither the home nurse or the maid will stay even 1 month if the payment isn’t on time. I call some old friends from school,

“Do you have some Rs 10,000 to spare?”

It’s humiliating. By November, I still hadn’t received any salary after 5 months. By that point, I had started selling furniture online just to get an extra Rs 2000. My mental health was at rock bottom. We were kicked out of our old home a couple of months earlier and my father’s health had begun to deteriorate. Everything was bleak.

Enquiries in the finance department had made one thing clear, the issue was that Mr Benny was simply too incompetent to do the formalities required and there was no way to replace him or get someone to do his job for him.

My first salary arrived shortly before my contract was about to end in December. And that was after my father passed away. Even that had a cruel twist on it, the pending salaries could not all be paid at once (at least according to Mr Benny) so each would come every month from then on till April.

Lessons

There is an expectation from the general public that anyone who passes MBBS should be rich. But the reality can be quite different. We are considered easy targets for irregular or delayed or even no payments at all.

Whether it be through malicious intent or sheer incompetence, doctors are considered to be professionals who can tolerate irregular payments. This is particularly true for those working on ad-hoc basis and those without any sort of union to protect their interests.

I wish I could recommend some easy solution for such problems. The best way is to avoid such issues in the first place – do your research before joining any new job.