A man from Banihal walked into the ENT department of Government Medical College, Anantnag, not long ago, worn down by weeks of something quietly wrong. This creeping, unexplained illness had been dragging him lower with each passing day. The on-duty doctor examined him and found the culprit: a leech-like creature lodged in his nasal cavity.
The ENT specialist on call was summoned. With the kind of steady, practised precision that comes only from years of high-pressure public service, he removed it. The man from Banihal went home. That story will not trend on social media. It will not make headlines. There are no outrage cycles built around things going right.
But this week, there is outrage. The cardiology department of GMC Anantnag is in the news. A government chargesheet, issued by the Health and Medical Education Department, alleges that an Associate Professor of Cardiology booked 103 cases under the Dual Chamber Pacemaker Implantation package while physically performing a different procedure, Left Bundle Branch Area Pacing, on patients.
“An expert panel from SKIMS, Soura, reviewed the cases and found that 27 out of 55 evaluated patients had normal LV function,” raising questions about clinical justification. The doctor has been suspended and served a chargesheet; he retains the right to present his defence. If the inquiry finds him guilty, he should get what he deserves. Until that process reaches its conclusion, the allegations remain what they are: allegations.
But GMC Anantnag is not one department’s controversy. An institution is not a single news cycle. A technical dispute around cardiology procedures, the kind that requires expert panels and specialised audits to even understand, lands in the hands of outraged laymen, gets reduced to a headline, and suddenly an entire medical college carries the weight of it. That is what is happening now. And it is costing the people who have spent years trying to build this place up.
There are doctors at GMC Anantnag who have had every opportunity to leave. Associate professors, consultants, DNBs, people with the credentials and the competence to earn manifold more in private practice. Government hours are brutal, OPD numbers are in the hundreds daily, and the infrastructure often cannot keep up with the load. And yet they stayed.
While one department’s proceedings dominate the conversation, their work goes unacknowledged, as it almost always does. It is also worth saying plainly that a public institution which delivers quality care at no cost changes the calculus for those who have long charged for the same. That is not an allegation against anyone. It is simply a pattern that follows wherever capable government healthcare takes root.
Consider what Dr Showkat Shifa, who heads the Paediatrics department, did for a student who arrived at his OPD shortly before her Class 12 board examinations, too unwell to sit for the exam. He stabilised her. He ensured she was fit. And then, well outside the scope of any job description, he accompanied her to the examination centre to see that she was comfortable and managing. He did not admit her, write a prescription, and move on to the next patient. He did what a father does. There is no protocol for that. No government order mandates it. It came from somewhere else entirely, from the kind of commitment that no salary justifies and no performance review captures.
In the Orthopaedics department, Dr Tabish Kirmani performed bilateral hip replacement surgeries on a labourer from Kokernag who had been bedridden for a year, unable to work, unable to walk without pain, and quoted several lakh rupees at multiple private facilities. The implants used were USFDA-approved. The cost to the patient: nothing, all under the Golden Card scheme. He is walking now, without aids. This is not a press release. It is a man’s livelihood returned to him.
The Department of Ophthalmology, with experts like Dr. Rayees Ahmad Sofi, has performed over 7,700 cataract surgeries since 2023, along with nearly 1,850 intravitreal injections, procedures for which patients from this region previously had to travel all the way to Srinagar. GMC Anantnag was the first among the new medical colleges in the valley to start basic vitreoretinal services, the kind of subspecialty work that takes years of experience, multiple postgraduate degrees, and fellowships to build.
Ocular trauma cases, which once meant a difficult and anxious journey to Srinagar for people who could least afford the time and the distance, are now being managed at their doorstep. This Eid alone, four children who had suffered firecracker injuries to their eyes were operated upon at GMC Anantnag. These are not small numbers and not small moments. These are people who kept their sight, and children who did not have to wait.
In the Dental Surgery department, Dr. Adil Wani spent over forty minutes removing an impacted wisdom tooth that lay horizontal in the jaw, the kind of case that referring doctors across the district were routinely sending all the way to the Dental College in Srinagar. Many patients made that long journey because they did not know that this kind of care had arrived closer to home.
The HOD, Dr. Sanjeet Singh Risam, stood through the entire procedure from start to finish, watching, ensuring nothing went wrong. He did not know the patient. He stayed anyway. That is what a department that takes itself seriously looks like from the inside.
Then there is the Maternity and Child Care Hospital at Sherbagh, functioning out of a building that strains under the weight of the patients it was never designed to hold. Overcrowded and under-resourced, the doctors and staff there absorb a patient flow that would test far better-equipped facilities. They manage it every single day, without the headlines, without the recognition.
There is a hadith from Sunan Abi Dawud that says: “Whoever does not thank people has not thanked Allah.” That is not a soft sentiment. It is a moral instruction about what we owe the people who show up for us, especially when we are most vulnerable.
Medical negligence happens in institutions across the world. When it does, it must be investigated, and the inquiry at GMC Anantnag is evidence that the system, imperfect as it is, can move when the threshold is met. But here is what also happens too often: the inquiry is announced, outrage is expressed, cameras move on, and nobody is ever told whether the findings held or the case fell apart.
Patients who protested never hear the conclusion. That gap between announced inquiry and communicated outcome is its own failure, and it is what makes every future allegation feel permanent when it may not be.
In less than a decade, GMC Anantnag has taken on a major share of the healthcare burden of South Kashmir, a region that accounts for nearly a quarter of the valley’s population. In every department, procedures that once required patients to travel are now being done here. The college has produced toppers of the state. It is a government institution built from scratch, still building, serving one of the most underserved regions of Jammu and Kashmir, under pressure that most of its critics will never have to work under.
What it has built, imperfect, overstretched, still growing, is ours. The doctors who stayed when they could have left are ours. The man from Banihal who went home is ours.
Hold the institution to account when it fails. But do not let one department’s controversy erase what hundreds of others have quietly built, one patient at a time, in a building most people only enter when they have nowhere else to go.
(The writer is a journalist with Rising Kashmir based in South Kashmir and can be reached at [email protected])
