Chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Saturday made light of the mass resignations from state hospitals, saying such actions were legally invalid.

“Individual resignation is different. Mass resignation won’t help as per law,” the chief minister said during the news conference at the state secretariat, held after the protesting junior doctors did not turn up for talks with her.

At least 500 doctors have resigned to support the striking junior doctors across Bengal since Friday.

Several senior government doctors confirmed what Mamata said. A government doctor’s resignation involves a long process and a notice period of months. Their resignations were a token of protest in solidarity with the junior doctors, they added.

“Senior government doctors cannot just resign today and leave tomorrow. The resignation has to go through a proper channel that includes the head of the institute, the director of medical education and lastly, the governor. There is a notice period of three months,” the doctor, who is a faculty at the IPGMER and had resigned on Friday, told Metro.

“Mass resignation is an effective tool of protest. Look at the national attention that this has generated. But it is certainly not valid from an administrative point,” said the doctor.

The spate of resignations started from Sagore Dutta College in Kamarhati on Thursday. Several colleges in the state followed suit.

The principal and vice-principal of NRS Medical College and Hospital, where the trouble started in the early hours of Tuesday, had resigned from their posts citing their inability to handle the crisis. The two had sent their resignation letters to the director of medical education at the state’s health department headquarters. The resignations have not been accepted.

A doctor at the College of Medicine and Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital in Nadia’s Kalyani, where 41 professors submitted a mass resignation on Saturday, said they had done so as a mark of protest and it was now up to the government to decide what it wanted to do with it.

The common pro forma in all the cases has been a written or typed statement on a piece of paper signed by the doctors who are resigning. A resignation letter bearing the signatures of the 100-odd doctors at NRS Hospital was sent to the director of medical education.

The resignation letter sent by doctors of the Calcutta Medical College and Hospital states they had been trying to give their best to “take care of all patients and run the hospital smoothly and peacefully” but were “unable to provide proper service” because of the current situation.

Another senior SSKM doctor said she was working overtime to keep the hospital running. “I support the movement in unequivocal terms. But I cannot quit,” said the doctor, who is treating patients wearing a black badge.Another senior government doctor said he had not resigned because it was futile. “If I resign, I will do so wholeheartedly,” he said.

The senior doctor said he supported the junior doctors but gave a rider. “Every organised protest movement should know entry and exit points. This movement is struggling to find an exit point,” said the doctor, a veteran of student protests.

Several doctors said they just wanted the impasse to end and see normalcy return to their workplaces. “I am praying the agitation is lifted on Sunday,” said a senior doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital.

A resident medical officer in another government hospital in Calcutta, who has been working overtime to keep the emergency services running despite resigning on Friday, said he genuinely supported the movement but cannot stop work because he is bound by service rules.

“I will have to talk to my peers to decide the next course of action,” said the doctor, who had bandaged his forehead to show his support for doctors, when asked if he was mulling an individual resignation.