Labour ministry to hire 5,000 doctors for ESIC hospitals, set up a Rs.600 crore super speciality hospital in Manesar

The union labour and employment ministry will appoint 5,000 doctors at Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) hospitals across India, and is set to establish a new super speciality hospital at the Manesar industrial belt at a cost of Rs 600 crore.

Labour Minister Bhupendra Yadav said that the appointments will be done within a year as against pending vacancies, and will allow hospitals to function with more capacity and serve a larger industrial workforce.

ESIC, a social security organisation like EPFO, runs a chain of hospitals and dispensaries across states and serves the industrial workers who are its subscribers. Currently around 3.5 crore industrial workers are subscribers of the ESIC that offers primary to tertiary care health facilities. “5,000 plus doctors will be appointed before the end of 2022. The process has been set in motion and we are expediting appointment,” Yadav said. He said for attracting quality super specialised doctors to ESIC hospitals, his ministry is ready to relook at the salary structure and pay competitive salary in sync with market realities.

The minister said that on February 13, he will formally do the ground breaking ceremony to establish the 500-bed super speciality hospital in Manesar, a large industrial and automobile manufacturing hub in Haryana state.

Yadav further informed that pending projects of the ESIC hospitals at several other states will be expedited and underlined that a digital dashboard has been put in place for ESIC to monitor work on a real time basis.

Rameswar Teli, the minister of state (MoS) for Labour and Employment, said the digital dashboards will will help in better monitoring of projects, provide viewers the current occupancy and OPD footfall at the hospitals, and a construction dashboard will give real time information about hospital construction projects of the ESIC.

Yadav also presented Pramod Bhagat, a gold medal winner at Tokyo Paralympics, a citation and cheque of Rs 1 crore and Bhavina Patel, a silver medal winner at Tokyo Paralympics a citation and cheque of Rs 50 lakh. Bhagat and Patel are ESIC employees and renowned sports personalities.

Industrial employers currently contribute 3.25 percent of the basic salaries of workers earning a monthly salary upto Rs 21,000, while employees contribute 0.75 percent for ESIC statutory deductions.