Hospital services were disrupted in several Indian cities on Tuesday after a doctors' protest spread nationwide following the rape and murder of a trainee in the city of Kolkata, authorities and media said.

Thousands of doctors marched on Monday in Kolkata and the surrounding West Bengal state to denounce the killing at a government-run hospital, demanding justice for the victim and better security measures.

The 31-year-old resident doctor was found dead on Friday. Police said she had been raped and murdered and a police volunteer was subsequently arrested in connection with the crime.

WATCH | Better security needed, say doctors in India: 

Doctors in India demand better security after shocking killing

The rape and murder of a female medical trainee has sparked a massive protest in India, with medical professionals demanding the government do more to keep workers safe.

"We can relate to it. It could have been me. It could have been any of us," Dr. Simran Kaur Dhaliwal, a second-year resident in KM Hospital in Mumbai, told CBC News Network Tuesday.

Dhaliwal told CBC she's been participating in the protests along with other residents across the country because their workplace is like their home during residency. 

"The nature of the crime was heinous, like, inexplicable. The things that happened to her in a hospital, where it's on 24 hours and people are going, coming and going all the time. And still this thing, this kind of thing is happening."

Protests spread on Tuesday, with more than 8,000 government doctors in the western Maharashtra state, home to the financial capital of Mumbai, halting work in all hospital departments except emergency services, media said.

In the capital, New Delhi, junior doctors wearing white coats held posters that read "Doctors are not punching bags," as they sat in protest outside a large government hospital, Reuters Television images showed.

Similar protests in cities such as Lucknow, capital of the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, and in the western tourist resort state of Goa hit some hospital services, media said.

No comment from health ministry

"Pedestrian working conditions, inhuman workloads and violence in the workplace are the reality," the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the biggest grouping of doctors in the country, told Health Minister J. P. Nadda in a letter released before they met him for talks on Tuesday.

The IMA's general secretary, Anilkumar J. Nayak, told the ANI news agency that his group had urged Nadda to step up security at medical facilities.

The health ministry did not immediately comment.

A high court in Kolkata ordered that the criminal investigation be transferred to India's federal police, the Central Bureau of Investigation, indicating that the authorities were treating the case as a national priority.

Emergency services remained suspended on Tuesday in almost all the government-run medical college hospitals in Kolkata and the government was assessing the impact on health services, a state official told Reuters.

Doctors in India's crowded and often squalid government hospitals have long complained of being overworked and underpaid, and say not enough is done to curb violence levelled at them by people angered over the medical care on offer.