India has rejected a request from Kenya to hire Indian doctors to address the on-going crisis in its health sector which has been paralysed by a strike, in which Indian officials said the country was not comfortable sending its health workers as it did not want to antagonise Kenyans.

Ceoafrica gathered that if a deal had been struck, the Indian doctors would have been offered 200,000 Kenyan shillings ($1,900; £1,500) a month for their services.

Kenyan doctors working in public hospitals have been striking for more than a month insisting that the government honour a 2013 deal to improve their pay and working conditions. Currently, an entry level doctor earns $380 a month.

Last week, Kenyan doctors rejected a pay deal offered by the government that would have upped the entry level pay to $1,895 a month, saying it did not match the 2013 deal.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly told President Uhuru Kenyatta that he would encourage the Indian health sector to invest in Kenya.

Thousands of Kenyans travel to India for specialised treatment every year and many HIV patients in Kenya depend on Indian-made generic anti-retroviral drugs.

However, six doctors of the Kenyan doctors union have been suspended, in which Judge Hellen Wasilwa warned that failure to comply with the directive to call off the strike by the employment and labour relations court, would attract stiffer sanctions.