Why Tamil Nadu leads the way?

But the charismatic actor-turned-chief minister of Tamil Nadu was very lucky, as his niece, M G C Leelavathy, whose blood group matched with that of her uncle MGR, at once donated one of her kidneys to enable the ailing super star spring back to health.

This widely publicised transplant done on a hugely popular person like MGR unwittingly launched the State simultaneously into the bigger, nobler orbit of organ donation and transplants for those yearning a rebirth from the shadows of near-death, with a new kidney, liver or even a heart.

As a ‘model patient’, MGR became Tamil Nadu’s organ transplant programme’s unique mascot.A sustained, well-coordinated people’s voluntarism could have made the programme even better in the State, if not for a series of ‘kidney sale scams’ that marred its reputation in the early 1990s. It mainly involved poor, debt-ridden powerloom and handloom weavers in the western textile belt like Kumarapalayam and Erode, who sold their organs to pay off debts.

While the post-December 2004 Tsunami witnessed a horrific rerun of the State’s fisherfolk victims allured to ‘organ sale rackets’, with middlemen and ill-equipped hospitals and some unscrupulous doctors making money in the bargain, even 10 years after the Centre had passed the ‘Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994’, the State finally woke up.

Now, in the last two years, with a ‘well-regulated framework’ to ensure transparency and fairness in organs donation and transplants in place in Tamil Nadu, its ‘cadaveric organ transplant programme’ has made impressive strides, State’s Health Secretary V K Subburaj and Information Secretary P W C Davidar, said in a recent open article.
In fact since October 2008, as per official figures, uploaded on a website ‘www.dmrhs.org’, created for spreading more awareness on this life-giving proposition, there have been 373 major organ transplants done on needy patients with 124 donors contributing to the shareable organs pool.

This ‘achievement’ is unique, claim the State officials. All other Indian States put together “have not done even half this number,” they contend, taking credit for Tamil Nadu Government’s efforts to push this programme in a more dignified, efficient way, matching donors with recipients legally. Yet, it is only one side of the story so far.

What enabled this progress in the last two years? “Basically, it is a lot of team work from the private hospitals, the State Government, NGOs and large-hearted donors to quick and efficient coordination by trained personnel linking donors to recipients through a web-based Registry network that has made all this happen,” says Dr Sunil Shroff, Managing Trustee of Chennai-based ‘Multi-Organ Harvesting Aid Network (MOHAN) Foundation’.

A whole array of initially ill-defined procedures and complex tasks like certification of brain death, have now been clarified in a proper regulatory framework by the State Government, Dr Shroff said.

Initially only neurosurgeons and neurophysicians could certify a person was ‘brain dead’ to enable the harvesting of his/her vital organs on the consent of their close relatives. Now even ‘ICU doctors  could certify ‘brain death’, he said.  

Some regulatory changes in doing post-mortem/inquest are also on the cards to enable organ transplants within few hours of their harvest, besides ‘sharing’ of organs between private and Government hospitals, Dr Shroff noted.  
  
Equally vital, says Dr Shroff, is having enough counsellors, who explain concepts like ‘brain death’ to potential donors and their family to raise awareness. The ‘MOHAN’ Foundation has been conducting a module for the last eight months to train such transplant counsellors to handle the entire matrix.

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