Kidney Racket

An international kidney racket was busted at Mumbai by the police. Many surgeons are found to be involved in the intercity racket. Since August 2003, five kidney rackets were busted in India. The kidney racket kingpin (so-called Dr. Amit Kumar) is absconding and international alert has been issued to track him down. It is also reported that he was arrested in 1994 and jumped bail and absconding since and operating under different names in different states in collusion with the local doctors. These surgeons are extremely skillful, but the greed for more and more money is driving them into this criminal activities. Often, poor patients who are admitted for some other ailments are operated upon to retrieve their kidneys. In some cases, poverty drives the poor to sell their kidneys for money. It is estimated that about 1.5 lakh patients have kidney failure every year in India. Only about 3500receive an organ for transplantation. Similar disparity is seen in cases of other organs such as cornea, liver, etc. Virtually there are no donors. The gap between the supply and \demand is too high and hence the organ trading rackets are mushrooming everywhere. The donor rates have to be increased. There is no centralized registry that can connect potential donors and recipients.

It is time that the government should felicitate establishment of donor centres. One has to sensitize the ICU doctors in hospitals to encourage organs donation of brain-dead patients and victims of road accidents. Laws need to be appropriately amended to facilitate this. One cadaver can benefit 10 patients by retrieval of heart, liver, kidney, cornea, pancreas, lungs and intestine. There were only 700 cadaver donors in India in the last 14 years. Public awareness programs with respect to organ donation should be shown as audio-visuals to clear many doubts such as medico-legal issues in the minds of the public with regards to the organs donation. Online registration with all the relevant details and establishment of central registry will immensely help in availability of organs for transplantation.