Brief history of nurses in India

By John Dayal

New Delhi, May 12, 2020: Of course there were nurses by any other name in Islamic countries, and in India before St Thomas. Midwives, Dhais and others brought our grandparents into the world. But caste and patriarchy prevented women in modern India taking up nursing as a trained profession.

Florence of the Crimean War was just a rumor. The blood, the gore, the dirty linen and, above all, the bed pan and the dead had made it an untouchable work, so to say it were women, little more than girls most of them, from Kerala’s Christian families who ventured forth as the pioneering nurses.

As, alas, a frequent in-patient in hospitals all these seven decades [falls and injuries long before the diabetes-related stuff], I have seen the changing face of nursing over the decades. From Christian Malayalees and Tamils to Maharashtrian and Telugu, Tribals of central and north east India, still Christian, to Hindus from all the southern and western states, and now sturdy and very gentle nurses from Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh. All religions.

Alas, their training, wages and salaries need government intervention. Once they were paid a handsome stipend and hostel facilities as they completed their courses as midwives and A Grade Nurses. This was before the BSc courses started which go on to PhD for the academically inclined.

Came the rush to the Persian Gulf as part of the oil boom (together with manpower and buffalo beef export to feed them), and nursing became lucrative and a passport to a higher life quality for dependent husbands and children. The boom sprouted genuine and fly-by-night nursing colleges.

Now instead of getting a stipend, student nurses have to pay a fee running into lakhs of rupees. The salaries are at the whims and fancies of employers. The lucky ones with a BSc or MSc and a job in the defense forces or government hospitals get the Seventh Pay Commission pay packet. They are the kings and queens of the pack.

Some nurses, alas, may be getting as little if not less than the guests at the door or the ward boy. Why do they work, I ask them as they change the bed sheet. They need the experience before they can sit for the certification that the West needs them to have before getting a work visa. They will work for a year or perhaps two. That accounts for the very heavy turnover in the junior cadres of the Nursing staff of all non-government hospitals. This is exploitation.

Trade unions exist, but have no collective bargaining strength. Their weakness is the need of their members to get that experience.

A work visa will change the fortune of the entire family, perhaps even extended family.

The icing on the cake: It may get a marriage proposal without too much of an exorbitant dowry.

Saluting all nurses on World Nursing Day. Especially all those wonderful, gentle, kind, understanding and loving women who tended to me when I needed it most.

God bless them.

PS: The photo is of the late Nurse Aruna Shanbaug of Mumbai. Her trauma is another story. But she needs to be remembered

(May 12 is the International Nurses Day. John Dayal is a Delhi-based veteran journalist and social activist.)