Lack of donors leads to big kidney rackets in India

Five years since the busting of a thriving racket of human kidneys in Gurgaon, where unsuspecting poor people would have their kidneys removed without their consent, a “huge disparity” between demand and supply of organs for transplant continues to promote a black market in kidneys, said doctors.

Medical professionals said it is the lack of availability of organs that leads to people resorting to illegal means in order to save the lives of their near and dear ones.

A special CBI court delivered its verdict in the sensational Gurgaon kidney scam of 2008, coming down heavily on the convicted doctors. It said the actions of the convicted doctors, including kingpin Amit Kumar, was a “slur on the nation”.

The doctors used to lure poor people on the pretext of giving them employment and later on removed their kidneys without their consent. The court sentenced two doctors to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 6 million each.

“Anything which has a great demand has a black market,” said Anoop Mishra, director, Centre of Diabetes at the Fortis Hospital. Indians are even going to Pakistan to get transplants done due to the lack of donors in India,” Mishra said.

Highlighting the bleak scenarios, a health ministry official who did not want to be named said, “Only five kidneys are available for every 100 patients suffering from end-stage renal failure in the country.”

Sandeep Guleria, senior nephrologist with Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, said, “There is a huge disparity between demand and supply of organs.” The problem lies, according to him, in the fact that cadaver organ transplant has not taken off in India.

Cadaver transplant is when the organs of brain dead people are harvested for transplantation.

“Due to the lack of donors, we have to make use of marginal donors or even incompatible transplants,” said Guleria. Following unearthing of the racket, the government had brought about changes in the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994, specially for the benefit of patients of renal failure.

 About 2,00,000 people are diagnosed with renal failure every year and for most, the only cure is kidney transplant. But less than 3,000 transplants are carried out annually in India due to strictures on possible donors under the present law.