The protesting junior doctors have agreed to meet chief minister Mamata Banerjee at Nabanna on Monday evening but will not end their fast unto death before the talks, a condition set by the Bengal government.

Inviting the junior doctors to a meeting with the chief minister at the state secretariat, Bengal chief secretary Manoj Pant had said in an email on Saturday that it would be a 45-minute session "with 10 of your colleagues, after withdrawal of the hunger strike".

Addressing a news conference after a general body meeting of the protesters at NRS Medical College and Hospital on Sunday, the junior doctors said the hunger strike would continue. "We are not ending the fast," said Debashis Halder, a junior doctor.

The doctors have sent an email to Pant informing him that a delegation would reach Nabanna "within the specified time" on Monday.

Till 9pm on Sunday, the chief secretary had not responded to the junior doctors’ email and it was not clear whether the chief minister would agree to the meeting if the junior doctors did not withdraw the fast unto death.

At the news conference, the junior doctors said they were hurt at the way the telephone conversation went with the chief minister on Saturday. Even after seven weeks of protest, the chief minister seemed unaware and uninformed about their demands, the junior doctors said.

The doctors have threatened a complete shutdown of healthcare facilities, both government and private, on Tuesday if all their demands are not met by Monday.

In the email to Pant, the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front wrote: “This is very unfortunate that after 70 days of extensive protests and 14 days of hunger strike... the Hon’ble Chief Minister, the head of the state, is uninformed about our demands and their clear formulations.”

A junior doctor said: “Either the chief minister is not aware or she is not being told about the demands.”

The protesters, however, welcomed the in-person meeting scheduled for Monday. “It is a welcome step from your side to accept our suggestion for a physical meeting for discussion as we feel that this impasse can only be resolved by a strong sense of goodwill. We will attend the meeting tomorrow within the specified time,” the email said.

While speaking to the junior doctors over the phone on Saturday, Mamata had told them not to keep her waiting as they had earlier done before meetings with her and state government officials.

Halder said on Sunday that it was wrong to blame the doctors for their delay in arriving at the venues of the earlier meetings as they had been given “very little time”.

He said the protesters were hoping that Monday’s meeting would yield a positive outcome and a solution would be found to the impasse.

“What form the protests will take depends on the outcome of the meeting. The chief minister has to understand which of our demands she has to accept for us to change the course of our protest,” Halder said after the general body meeting.

“We are hoping there will be positive discussions tomorrow and we will get a sense of how to end this impasse.”

On Saturday, Mamata spoke with the junior doctors over a phone that was kept on loudspeaker mode. She asked the junior doctors to list their demands before her, and she responded to each of them by spelling out the measures the government had taken.

The chief minister accepted all the demands, including a call to conduct student body elections, but refused togive in to the demand forthe resignation of health secretary Narayan Swaroop Nigam.

“I cannot do that,” she told a junior doctor who had broached the topic.

“Will you decide which officer of the government will go and who will not? That can’t be,” Mamata said. “If thereare specific allegations, wecan probe (them) but we can’t remove someone just like that.”

Nigam’s resignation was second on the list of the doctors’ 10 demands.

On Sunday, Halder said the doctors were seekingthe health secretary’s resignation because they felt he was one of those responsible for the rot in the healthcare system.