Justice for Payal Tadvi

We, members of the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA) and Medico Friend Circle (MFC)—national-level networks working on public health—strongly condemn the institutional murder of Payal Tadvi, a young medical doctor from an Adivasi community who broke through barriers of social discrimination to become the first doctor in her family and the first woman from her community to pursue post-graduation. We demand urgent action against caste oppression and humiliation by upper-caste senior doctors, which forced Tadvi to commit suicide. The rampant ingrained casteism and impunity in educational institutions must be urgently recognised and stopped.

She was continuously harassed and experienced gender and casteist abuse and discrimination by three senior doctors, which led her to take the extreme step of ending her life in the hostel of the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC)-run Topiwala National Medical College (TNMC) and B Y L Nair Charitable Hospital, Mumbai.