Hundreds of senior doctors from various medical colleges including Calcutta Medical College, CNM Medical College, Sagor Dutta Medical, North Bengal Medical College joined their RG Kar Medical College and Hospital colleagues tendering on Wednesday mass resignation in protest against the State Government's "nonchalant approach" towards the eight junior doctors who have been on an indefinite fast for the past 96 hours and whose condition continued to deteriorate.

"The condition of the junior doctors sitting in an indefinite fast is deteriorating by the hour and the Government is so arrogant and nonchalant that they have simply not cared to even call them for talks ... we the senior doctors could not sit back and enjoy the Durga Pujas while our children suffer like this for a rightful demand … so we have tendered mass resignation," one of the doctors of Calcutta Medical College said.

This, whereas scores of members of Junior Doctors' Association from Delhi, Jodhpur and other places started reaching the fasting site at Esplanade in central Kolkata to express their solidarity with their Kolkata brethren

About 50 senior doctors of RGKMCH had on Tuesday resigned en masse to express solidarity with their junior colleagues.

"This is almost the same place where our Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had done a 26-day fast against the setting up of Tata Nano factory at Singur in 2006 … she knows the pain and risk of such indefinite fast … yet her Government is not sensitive enough to come and talk to these junior doctors who are like our children and who are fighting in the interest of the general health set up of the State… is it not the duty of the Government to come and talk to them," said Dr Tamta a senior doctor.

Members of the civil society including actor Kaushik Sen, acitivist Sujata Bhadra too wrote to the Chief Minister requesting her to "take a sympathetic view towards the doctors' demands."

The doctors' movement started after the brutal rape and murder of a postgraduate lady doctor of the RGGKMCH on August 9 inside the seminar room of the chest medicine department of the hospital.

Even as the doctors demanded justice for the victim they added in their ten-point demand among other things a centralized referral system, security for all the medical staff inside the hospitals, ending of the threat syndicate and related malpractices that were rampant in most of the Government medical colleges and hospitals, basic amenities like rest rooms and washrooms for doctors, installation of CCTV cameras in all the Government hospitals, real-time monitoring of bed availability, and the establishment of task forces to ensure the proper functioning of essential facilities like CCTV cameras, on-call rooms, and washrooms, etc.  The doctors have also been asking for students' body elections --- that had not taken for quite some time now --- to be conducted in all colleges "so that students nominated by influential people from the ruling party do not get the chance to control the system and perpetrate a threat syndicate and extort lakhs of rupees from students and even subjecting them sexual exploitation, junior doctors said. 

Meanwhile Bengal Chief Secretary Manoj Pant said that the Government had received no official communication of mass resignation, adding such mass resignations were anything but procedural. "Resignations are tendered individually before they are accepted," he said apparently making the Government's intentions clear.

Elsewhere, the police on Wednesday stopped the vehicles carrying doctors around Durga Puja pandals where they were likely to raise slogans and sensitize the general people.