In a meeting held under the chairmanship of the Director General of Health Services (DGHS), Dr S.P. Aggarwal, today to review the situation arising out of the nurses' ongoing agitation, it was decided to postpone the vacations of all the doctors for the time being.

Meanwhile, health care services are likely to be paralysed despite all these contingency plans as all the nurses, who form the backbone of the healthcare, are likely to stay away from work. All routine surgeries are being postponed indefinitely, while the junior doctors and students are being roped in to maintain the basic services.

Dr Aggarwal said a round-the-clock control room manned by a senior doctor would be set up at Safdarjung, RML and Lady Hardinge Hospitals and those who show their willingness to work despite the strike call by various nurses' unions would be helped. In a letter sent to the Delhi government, MCD, NDMC and ESI, he has asked the authorities to make similar arrangements to ensure that the health care services are not affected.

The nurses have been observing a token strike for two hours everyday and are sitting on a relay hunger strike for over a week, demanding better pay scales, time-bound promotions, accommodation, nursing allowance, filling up of vacant posts of nurses all over the country and setting up of the directorate of nursing.

According to the Delhi Nurses Union (DNU) president S. Takwal, the DGHS in a meeting held with them on August 9 last year had taken up all the above issues and had promised to follow it up at the finance committee considering the `ardous' nature of their duties. The nurses, she said, were among the lowest paid in the country. The proposal to develop a nurses colony to solve their accommodation problem had also been hanging afire for the past eight years, they said.