Doctors in Balochistan are preparing to walk out across the province from November 1, after the Balochistan chapter of the Pakistan Medical Association threw its full weight behind a province-wide strike over taxes that doctors say have been imposed unfairly on their profession. The announcement, made in Quetta, sets up a confrontation between the province’s medical community and two revenue authorities, the Federal Board of Revenue and the Balochistan Revenue Authority, and it lands just days before a nationwide deadline doctors’ associations across the country have already set for the same dispute.
The decision was taken at a joint meeting of several doctors’ organisations, chaired by the association’s general secretary in the province, Dr Zarak Muhammad Shahi. Those at the meeting discussed the planned strike alongside other unresolved matters concerning the provincial health department, signalling that the tax question, while it is the immediate trigger, sits within a wider set of grievances doctors in Balochistan have been raising for weeks. The association has not yet published a detailed schedule of which services will stop, but its declaration of full support leaves little doubt that the action is intended to be province-wide rather than limited to a single city or hospital.
The timing is no coincidence. Earlier in October, medical associations from across Pakistan gathered at a convention in Gujrat, where around five hundred senior doctors, provincial representatives and health leaders adopted resolutions calling on the federal government, the Federal Board of Revenue and provincial healthcare commissions to act. They set November 1 as the deadline for concrete policy changes, warning that if their demands remained unmet, private clinics and healthcare facilities, along with outpatient departments at public hospitals, could close in phases under a coordinated plan. The Balochistan announcement is therefore not an isolated protest. It is the provincial arm of a national campaign.
At the heart of the dispute is how doctors and medical practices are taxed. The associations object in particular to point-of-sale requirements being applied to medical practices, and to penalties under Section 175C, arguing that healthcare should not be treated in the same way as an ordinary retail business. Their position is not a refusal to pay tax. Doctors’ leaders have said their members already meet their tax obligations, and they have called instead for uniform taxation across professional services, a review of recent revenue notifications, and formal consultation with medical representatives before commercial tax mechanisms are extended to clinics and hospitals.
This is also not the first time the dispute has spilled onto the streets. At the end of September, doctors observed a one-day strike against the revenue board’s tax policies, and private outpatient departments and chambers closed in major cities and districts across Sindh, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. In Balochistan, private hospitals remained closed on that day, and doctors and other health workers demonstrated outside the Bolan Medical Complex in Quetta, warning that taxing private hospitals, laboratories and clinics would raise the cost of healthcare and burden the public. During that earlier protest, emergency rooms, intensive care units, coronary care units and other life-saving services at public hospitals continued to operate.
Balochistan’s doctors have also been pressing a province-specific concern alongside the tax question. In early October, a delegation from the association’s Balochistan and Quetta Zone cabinets, led by its provincial president Dr Naeem Zarkoon and including Dr Shahi, met National Party president Dr Abdul Malik Baloch. The delegation raised the taxes imposed by the two revenue authorities, and it also raised the province’s artificial intelligence-based attendance system, which it said did not correspond to the ground realities of Balochistan and was creating difficulties even for doctors who regularly performed their duties. The association stressed that it firmly opposed absenteeism, but argued that the system as designed penalised conscientious doctors as well. Dr Baloch promised to help resolve the issues, but the strike call weeks later suggests those assurances have not yet produced a settlement.
For patients, the stakes are plain. If the strike goes ahead, routine consultations at private clinics and outpatient appointments at public hospitals are the services most likely to be disrupted first, since those are precisely the services the national campaign has named in its phased-closure warning. People who depend on regular check-ups and diagnostic services would feel the effect quickly, while emergency and life-saving care has, in past protests, been kept running.
What happens next depends on whether talks can produce something tangible before November 1. Following the Gujrat convention, the association’s central secretary general wrote to the prime minister seeking high-level intervention and meaningful dialogue, describing the approach as a final opportunity to avert a major disruption to healthcare services. The governments, the two revenue authorities and the medical associations therefore have a short window in which to agree on a workable tax system. If that window produces a negotiated settlement, the strike could still be called off. If it does not, Balochistan will join a coordinated national action on November 1, and the argument over whether doctors are being taxed fairly will move from meeting rooms into hospital corridors, where patients will experience its consequences first-hand.
