The rape and murder of a female doctor in India sets off an outcry over women's safety

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

The case has once again brought to the forefront the discussion of women’s safety in India — with special concerns voiced by women who are medical professionals.

“My first reaction was that of absolute horror. I could feel the anger in my bones,” says Dr. Kamna Kakkar, a resident doctor from Delhi. “Hospitals are supposed to be places which are safe and revered like temples. When I don the white coat to save lives, I expect to be provided safety.”

Her thoughts were echoed by the seven female doctors and nurses interviewed for this story — and are similar to points raised on two WhatsApp groups by over 200 medical professionals in India.

Along with protests demanding better security measures for women, these medical professionals are speaking out about the lack of respect they are afforded in their workplace. They say they’re not safe at work nor do they have safe resting places when they do shift work. They’re also calling attention to sexual harassment from peers and patients alike.

According to details made public by courts and police, the woman who was raped and murdered — she cannot be named by law — was found with extensive injuries in the seminar hall of the hospital, where she was resting at the end of a 36-hour shift late night shift. A police volunteer — a unpaid civilian recruited for minor policing duties — was detained in connection with the crime.

India's Supreme Court speaks out

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 a decade later — has sparked nationwide anger and condemnation. In response, the Indian Supreme Court, last Tuesday, announced it would hear the case surrounding the woman’s murder,and ordered a national task force to investigate workplace safety for doctors.

The Supreme Court announcement came after more than a dozen protests by medical professions, and thousands of citizens across India.

One of India’s largest unions representing doctors, the Indian Medical Association, is demanding increased security protocols — “no less than an airport” — for all hospitals. In a statement, they called for deployment of more security personnel and closed-circuit TV for surveillance.

The infrastructure at most public hospitals isn’t built with regard to women’s safety, doctors told NPR. Women doctors typically don’t have specially-designated bathrooms or safe places to rest or sleep. “In one instance I know, a lady doctor was made to sleep inside the ward because no doctor's duty room was provided to her,” Dr. Kakkar said,

On August 16, following the rape and murder in Kolkata, that association, which counts over 360,000 doctors as members, announced a nationwide strike to demand safer spaces for women medical professionals. Participating doctors refused services to non-emergency patients. While exact figures weren’t collated, the Supreme Court appealed for doctors to return to work, saying that their strike had denied medical care to Indians across the country.

A history of gender violence

Gender-based violence has been a long-standing issue in India. Nearly one in three women in India has reported experiencing some form of violence, according to a national health survey conducted by the Indian Ministry of Health, sampling nearly 725,000 women across the country.

New laws in the wake of a 2012 gang rape in Delhi have instituted stricter punishments for violence against women, including longer sentences and even the death penalty in cases of rape. Yet the number of confirmed cases of rape has risen from 337,922 in 2014 to 445,256 in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available.

The enactment of more laws is not the solution says Karanjeet Kaur, a columnist for Indian daily The Print.

“In India, the problem has never been that the laws are not friendly toward women. The problem has always been the uneven application of, those laws,” Kaur says. "There's very little that Indian women can really hope for if especially if they are from historically disempowered, communities.

This high-profile case also has brought attention to India’s low rates of employment of women. One reason is that they lack safety in their commute and in their workplaces. And yet the rape of a doctor in a hospital, was still shocking, Kaur says, even though a survey from 2015 reported that about three-quarters of doctors reported experiencing violence in their workplace.

Doctors, she says, “"are considered next to God,” while many Indians also identified with the challenges she faced in becoming a doctor, only "to have her life so callously and so brutally taken away from her."

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