India got its ICU guidelines in May. They arrived without a clock, and a rule with no deadline is a suggestion. Every hospital in the country knows the difference.

Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah and Justice R. Mahadevan heard the matter on 21 September. Their Committee had already gone through the guidelines line by line and suggested a deadline for each one. The bench kept nearly all of that list and made one change: anything the Committee gave 12 months now has nine. Then it ordered the work done and fixed a date to come back and check. Nobody had filed this case. The Court raised it itself.

Four items were given no time at all. Infection control, safety, documentation and audit were due on the day the order was signed. None of them needs a tender, a supplier or any money. They need a protocol on paper and someone following it.

Equipment is where hospitals will read it wrong. Emergency equipment and imaging look like six-month jobs. They are two three-month stages, and only the first one is strict. You have three months to raise the purchase order. Installation can take up to three months more. At month three the Court is checking your paperwork, not your machine.

Paragraph 8 is where this stops being someone else’s problem. Six months to fill your ICU posts, and the order says it binds institutions not under Government control. That includes a fifty-bed nursing home.

Day four. Routine OPD and elective surgery have been shut since Thursday. Emergency OPD, emergency theatres, ICU, labour room and blood bank are running, and the residents put that in writing before anyone asked them to. The demands have not moved since Wednesday. What has changed is that workload now arrives with figures attached.

General medicine: more than 700 patients a day in OPD, first-years going four to five days without leaving the building. Obstetrics and gynaecology: 36-hour continuous duties, two to three times a week. Cardiology: 80 to 85 hours a week with no clerical staff, so the residents do the data entry. Radiology: workload doubled, staff fewer, no secure duty room or toilet for women on nights. Transfusion medicine: not one junior resident recruited all year, the department running on four.

Count how little of that list costs money. An online leave portal, so a resident stops having to find his own replacement before he can be ill. A data entry operator. A toilet. Drinking water in the wards. The priciest item on the sheet is more PG seats, and that is an NMC decision, not a Jodhpur one.

Executive Director Dr Goverdhan Dutt Puri walked into the protest on Thursday. A resident took the microphone and told him to resign before any talks, and he folded his hands and left. On Friday the institute’s own Medical Faculty Association backed the residents and called the issues valid. The RDA posted from outside his residence at 1:30 AM, and again at 4 AM. Saturday’s visitor was Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, who is the MP for Jodhpur and holds Culture and Tourism. AIIMS reports to Health. The post-mortem is awaited and the cause of death is not established.

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A patient died on 22 September. Four of his relatives allegedly beat the junior resident on duty, inside the ICU. Residents withdrew from non-emergency OPD and routine IPD on Thursday, kept emergency and critical care running, and asked for a written, time-bound reply. Friday brought a meeting with the Nagpur police commissioner and assurances instead: more security, strict action against the accused, no victimisation for having protested. The protest ended the same day.

One thing did change, and other RDAs should be citing it by Monday. The injured doctor had walked into a police station and filed his own complaint, the way assaulted residents usually do. AIIMS Nagpur says it will now run the legal and police proceedings itself. Assurances die with the next administration. An institution carrying the file is a precedent. The other ask, a no-special-treatment policy after the RDA alleged that patients arrive with letters from politicians, is still unwritten.

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Roughly 60 suits in August 2025. More than 200 US federal cases a year later, pooled into one litigation over NAION, an ischaemic event in the optic nerve that arrives overnight with no warning and no pain, and does not come back.

The 2024 work from Massachusetts Eye and Ear offered a mechanism, GLP-1 receptors sitting on the optic nerve itself, and declined to call it causal. A 2025 study in JAMA Network Open found raised risk with semaglutide and with tirzepatide, then added the sentence that never survives a headline: in absolute terms the risk stayed low.

Double a one-in-ten-thousand event and you get two, which leaves 9,998 people untouched. That is the sentence to have ready in OPD. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly dispute the allegations, and no court has ruled on any of them.

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Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak, who holds health and medical education, has asked doctors across Uttar Pradesh to write medicine and test names in Hindi or Devanagari, and to speak to patients in their own mother tongue. Two handwritten pages dated 25 September, on department letterhead, with a couplet in red ink.

Two lines are doing more work than the other two pages. He writes that he will personally give preference to medicines whose names are in Hindi, and that doctors who use Hindi will be honoured. Whether that preference stops at his desk or reaches state procurement is the question a pharma commercial team will be asking on Monday. There is no notification, rule or circular, so nothing here binds anyone.

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