This is a story grim enough to disprove the optimist's maxim that there is some good in all of us. A couple of months ago, an unlicensed doctor called Amit Kumar was arrested in Nepal. He had in his possession suitcases full of cash dollars and euros. He had earned them by performing hundreds of illegal kidney transplants, taking them from poor, sometimes unwitting donors for the benefit of wealthy Indians and foreigners.
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Back in New Delhi, the premises he had been using and working from were raided and Manzil Saini, the young policewoman who cracked this case describes what she found there:
"There were five donors there and they were left in a really pathetic condition. They were saying that just a few minutes before we came some assistants told them, ‘The doctor has been caught and the police is coming.'
So what they did was remove all their blood drips and glucose and said, ‘You also run away from here'. Their kidneys were operated on that same day a few hours earlier, and they were just left there. There was no one left to take care of them. When we came in there, one of the patients was actually writhing in pain."
In a nearby guesthouse, several foreigners and non-resident Indians were also arrested. They had come to buy a kidney from Dr Amit Kumar. Dr Kumar in turn had a network of touts who scoured neighbouring towns and villages preying on people reduced to such destitution that selling an organ was the only way they could get by. Some donors were compensated by a few thousand rupees, others were not so lucky.
'Painter' is a 53-year-old homeless man from Meerut, a poor satellite town of New Delhi, who was approached by a tout:
"I drank then and I still do. So, in my drunken state, they told me that ‘You've got a stone in your stomach.' And they said I needed an operation. So they duped me and got my kidney. I found out later when the doctor was arrested. I didn't go to the police. I wouldn't lie - I was afraid, maybe they'd arrest me for going with them. I don't even know where they took me. I was unconscious when they drove me away."
Praful Bidwai is a fellow at Delhi's Transnational Institute, where he has worked on issues of global justice and medical ethics for the past 20 years.
"I think it's just a terrible failure of regulation in India and many other countries. Completely unacceptable morally, ethically, utterly unjustifiable under all circumstances. The recipients have a moral obligation to consider the state of the donor and the economic compulsions that force them to have an organ removed."
Loophole
The homeless of Meerut like
Ramesh and Painter sleep on this
street, huddled under shop
awnings. This is where most of the
kidney donor victims in Meerut
came from. (go to slideshow)
Currently Indian law prohibits any sort of payment for organs, making it a crime amounting to organ trafficking. But there is a loophole in the law that allows people to donate a kidney to someone ‘you've developed an affection for.' Also, it's basically meaningless when it comes to policing such a decree.
It is significant to note that Dr Amit Kumar was finally caught in Nepal, not India. In fact he was first arrested in India in 1994, but always managed to bribe his way out, then he would move to a new city and start again. In 2000, he was even arrested by the Delhi police, and released again.
Demand
Praful Bidwai sums it up grimly:
"It's a major societal crisis. I mean you have this very young police officer, who's very sincere and dedicated and serious about her job, who busted this case, but for every person like that in the police force, there are dozens who will look the other way. For every Kumar arrested there are twenty others who will still be at large. This couldn't have happened without there being a whole infrastructure. It's quite clear that there are a lot of people in the medical profession - including doctors, nurses, anaesthesiologists, and paramedics - involved."
There are just 500 legal kidney transplants in India every year, but the demand is at least 100 times greater. Along with the supply and demand gap, the huge divide between the haves and have-nots means that the Amit Kumars of this world will always have customers who are prepared to overlook the real ethical and human cost of one kidney.
*From a report by Piya Kochhar and Chhavi Sachdev.
Tags: Amit Kumar, homeless, India, kidney donor, kidney transplant, Meerut, Nepal, New Delhi, scam