Aizawl: At the G20 meeting held in the first week of March, the Mizoram government presented itself as “The Talent Capital.” Government servants presented core sectors where the state could provide its services to the visiting delegates and their home countries. Nursing was one of the four key sectors highlighted alongside the famed Bamboo, Handloom and Handicraft and Skill Development.
As per the data presented, currently, there are 700-1000 nurses available for recruitment in Mizoram. There are nine nursing institutes with around 260 yearly graduates offering courses such as B.Sc Nursing, M.Sc Nursing and General Nursing and Midwifery.
The state has 5, 984 registered nurses under the Mizoram Nursing Council of which about 500 are working in India (outside Mizoram) and around 100 are working outside India.
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It does not take much number crunching to infer that the supply exceeds job availability. Due to this, even though over two hundred nurses graduate every year in Mizoram, they either to work in other states or to work for low wages at private hospitals. Not that there are many vacancies there also.
K Laltlanpuii, Ward Superintendent at Zoram Medical College told EastMojo, “There are no jobs even for 10% of the nurses who graduate. They have no choice other than to go to other states or work in foreign countries.”
As with other sectors, most nurses aim for government hospitals due to financial security as jobs in private hospitals only offer minimal wages despite long hours but job openings in the government are rare. The nurses EastMojo spoke to said they also face difficulties due to political favouritism.
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Malsawmsangi,* who works as a nurse at a private hospital in Aizawl, told EastMojo: “There are good nursing institutions in the state but there need to be systematic placement procedures in place. When we seek jobs in government hospitals, our degrees and experiences are not enough, jobs are available only for those who have strong political ties.”
She also felt that nurses are not given due credit for their hard work, “I graduated from my General Nursing and Midwifery course in 2007 and from my experience I can say that people look down on nurses, we are not given any importance. In foreign countries, there is more priority given to nurses, there is also a huge disparity in wages. For example, in Mizoram when we are called to give home care, they usually just give us a handshake instead of a proper payment.”
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Rinhlui*, who also works at a private hospital, said she agrees with Malsawmsangi. “I completed my nursing degree in 2008 in Andhra Pradesh. My main goal was to work in the government and I have faced interviews and appeared for written examinations many times. Till today, I did not get selected,” she said. Rinhlui has now worked in private hospitals for 15 years.
“It often feels like the government is not fair when they fill up vacancies. What people say is that you cannot get a job if you do not have someone on the inside who is helping you, this seems quite true from what I have seen so far. I have given up and now my only hope is to go to a foreign country because there we get paid better and I also think it will be better for my future.”
There are some nurses like Lallianmawii, a B.Sc Nursing graduate who returned to Mizoram after working in hospitals across the country. “I worked for three years in Birla Hospital in Kolkata and Apollo Hospital in Chennai and then went on to work in Singapore for four years. I had to return to Mizoram due to family-related issues. The experience is incomparable: everything I learnt is from the experience I had in hospitals outside of the state where the service is professional and systematic, which is unlike the service in Mizoram.
“In each aspect, Mizoram fares the lowest. I wish all the nurses would have outside work exposure because here, they just follow the routine that was started by seniors where people try to simplify the nursing care in a way that is best suited to their ease and comfort. Nursing care is even worse in government hospitals. It may be because their nurse-to-patient ratio is less. You could say they are used to giving poor-quality service to patients and the pattern continues with each new batch.”
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Lallianmawii also told EastMojo that from what she has seen, she believes working in foreign countries could help boost the state’s economy, “I think it is best if more nurses worked in other countries, there will be increased money movement and it would improve the economy of our state. Some of the nurses I know have saved up enough to buy properties and build a house for their families. They would never have been able to accomplish that if they were working in Mizoram.”
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While many nurses aim to work outside the state, there are a few nurses like Ngurliani who have set their minds on working in Mizoram. However, even they are not happy with the arrangements made by the government, “My aim is to work in Mizoram, I have no interest in working anywhere else but it is very hard to find a job. In job advertisements where there are 25 vacant posts, over 3,000 people give in their applications. Just from this, you can see how hard it is to get a job. But the point that is hard to understand is that while there are no jobs for us, there are so many vacancies in villages and rural areas where people are suffering due to a lack of medical facilities and trained personnel. It’s just that there is no proper planning done on the part of the government. Priority is not given to the health sector,” she said.
*Some names have been changed to protect their identity and jobs.
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