Sharad Kendre graduated from a nursing college in Maharashtra’s Latur district eight years ago. But he is still waiting for an opportunity ...
Sharad Kendre graduated from a nursing college in Maharashtra’s Latur district eight years ago. But he is still waiting for an opportunity to use his skills, even as the coronavirus pandemic strains the state’s public health systems and forces health workers employed in hospitals to work long hours without a break.
It has been over two years since Kendre applied for a government job.
Maharashtra government’s Directorate of Health Services had announced in February 2019 that it was going to conduct recruitment exams to fill more than 1,500 vacancies for staff nurses and specialist nurses in public hospitals across the state.
Such recruitment drives are not frequent. Like thousands of qualified nurses across Maharashtra, Kendre responded to the advertisement. Since he had a postgraduate degree, he filled up the application form in the specialist nurse category and waited for the exam dates to be announced.
But the exams were not held for two years.
On February 28 this year, when 30,000 nursing graduates finally sat for the exams, Maharashtra had already spent almost a year grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus had killed over 52,000 people in the state, overwhelmed hospitals and exposed the severe shortage of doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers that has always ailed India’s public...
