Chief minister Mamata Banerjee announced at midnight on Monday after a five-hour meeting with junior doctors that Calcutta will have a new police commissioner at 4pm on Tuesday.

The deputy commissioner of police (north), Abhishek Gupta, under whose jurisdiction falls RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, will be removed and there will be more changes in Kolkata Police.

From the state health department, Mamata announced the removal of the director of medical education and the director of health services.

The junior doctors, however, refused to go back to work.

Addressing protesters squatting on the road outside the state health headquarters in Salt Lake, the junior doctors said any decision on whether to end their strike would be taken only after the chief minister’s announcements were executed on the ground and the Supreme Court’s Tuesday hearing was completed.

The assertion to continue the strike around 12.30am came after the chief minister iterated her appeal to the junior doctors to resume duties as “many people have died and many are not receiving treatment”.

She said the state government would not take any action against the doctors who have been on a cease-work for more than a month.

The changes Mamata announced on Monday were part of the junior doctors’ five-point demands which they went with to meet the chief minister on Monday evening.

One demand that the state government did not fulfil was the removal of the state’s health secretary.

At the news briefing outside her Kalighat home past midnight, Mamata explained that if three persons from the same department were removed at the same time it would become difficult to run the department.

“I explained to them that if all three persons are removed from the same place (health department), then how will the department run? The director of medical education (DME) and the director of health services (DHS) will be removed,” Mamata said. “Since the students said they did not have faith in the DME and DHS, we are removing them. We are not disrespecting them. There is no senior post than the DME and DHS,” Mamata said.

“The commissioner of Kolkata Police (Vineet Goyal) will be removed after 4pm on Tuesday. A lot of things have been said about him. He has told us that he too has a family. We will send Vineet where he wants to work. We will also remove the DC North. There will be some more changes,” she said.

“The meeting was positive. We have conceded to more of their demands because they are young. We have urged them to go back to work. There are floods. There will be water-borne diseases. There will be a spurt in malaria and dengue cases. We will not take any action against the doctors,” she said.

The junior doctors have alleged that as the head of Kolkata Police, Goyal has to accept responsibility for the mob attack at RG Kar past midnight on August 14 and for failing
to secure the scene of crime on August 9.

The parents of the raped and murdered doctor had alleged that Gupta, the DC North, had offered them money at their home on August 9.

Many of the doctors did not seem to be in a mood to relent.

A junior doctor, Ashfakulla Naiya, said they would “snatch the removal of the health secretary also”.

Another junior doctor, Debashis Halder, said: “The state government has bowed to our demands. The government has said a task force will be set up. The chief minister sanctioned an amount for upgrading infrastructure. But we told her the funds wouldn’t be useful unless democratically elected bodies are in place at medical colleges. Only when the environment in medical colleges is changed can incidents like the one on August 9 be prevented.”

Forty-two junior doctors from various medical colleges signed the minutes of the meeting on behalf of the junior doctors while Bengal chief secretary Manoj Pant signed on behalf of the state government.

The minutes of the meeting mentioned that the state government had proposed a task force headed by the chief secretary that will also have representatives of junior doctors to look into issues of safety and security in hospitals.

The minutes added: “...The existing threat culture prevalent in the medical colleges can be removed after further deliberations through specific formulations (democratically elected students unions and RDAs etc).”

Monday’s ice-breaker offer for talks came from chief secretary Pant. In an email to the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, Pant wrote at 11.48am inviting the doctors to a meeting at the chief minister’s Kalighat home at 5pm. The letter clearly mentioned “there will be no live-streaming or videography of the meeting, given that the matter is sub judice in the highest court of the country”. But “minutes of the meeting will be recorded and signed by both the parties”.

The junior doctors convened a general body meeting with representatives from several medical colleges. The Front wrote back at 3.53pm saying they wanted to take with them two “transcript takers” for the meeting and sought a response.

Pant wrote back in less than an hour — at 4.33pm — that signed minutes of the meeting will be shared. The Front sent an email at 4.57pm and confirmed the meeting.

The delegation of junior doctors reached the chief minister’s Kalighat home at 6.15pm after leaving Salt Lake at 5.48pm.

Besides Mamata and Pant, home secretary Nandini Chakravorty and director-general of police Rajeev Kumar were present in the meeting.

The meeting with the chief minister started around 6.40pm. The doctors left the chief minister’s home at 11.45pm.

Sources said much of the duration was spent in thrashing out a consensus on what would be kept in the minutes of the meeting. “We agreed on some points and we disagreed on some,” a junior doctor said while stepping into the bus that brought them to Kalighat from Salt Lake.

Mamata said: “We want justice for Abhaya and for all the women who are affected throughout the country.”