Kidney Soup

Kidney soup

By HT
Wednesday October 17, 12:54 AM

YOU MAY be a poor farmer who has not travelled beyond the well at the edge of your village. Your kidney, however, may be very well travelled. Globalisation has meant that organs, especially kidneys, traverse boundaries for purposes of transplant. But transplants, which made headlines three decades ago, are done at clinics across the world.

Interestingly, donor organs travel south to north, poor to rich, black and brown to white, and females to males. And India, with its small and poor neighbours like Myanmar and Nepal, is becoming a hunting ground for cheap kidneys. While in the US a kidney transplant costs Rs 40 lakh, in India one can get it done for Rs 15-20 lakh. Refugee peasants, villagers in debt and hapless widows have become the reservoir of this trafficking, handled by a dozen middlemen who act as intermediaries between wealthy patients (mostly foreigners) and aspiring organ peddlers.

Wealthy patients even from Europe will travel great distances for a transplant in India, Brazil or China. This despite infection rates being higher in developing countries as they rely more on living donors, say police. In the West, organs are removed only from corpses. Also, nearly 1.3 per cent of India is affected by kidney failures. All this has spawned a thriving, unscrupulous industry. A few doctors have put in place a network of agents and sub-agents to fetch them a steady flow of living donor organs, as the Mumbai Crime Branch found after last week's arrest of 52-year-old Dr Palani Ravichandran, a Chennai-based nephrologist.

And though they might not have graduated to the viciousness of Yakuza gangsters - an international crime syndicate paid to locate kidney donors in other countries - Indian kidney agents travel from hamlets to city streets, says a police officer requesting anonymity. "Some top hospitals and doctors in the country are involved in the racket, which is rampant in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat," he said.

"We have information about key agents operating from Nepal and Myanmar, and others in India. We are zeroing in on them," said Dhananjay Daund, assistant inspector of police, Crime Branch. Dr Ravichandran had his agents in all these places, including Sri Lanka. "So vicious is the network that you just have to leave your cell number with a paramedic, guard or a porter at some hospitals in Nepal. You will have a flurry of calls with a variety of donors to choose from," said the officer.

After Jitu Borkar, 26, a labourer from Mumbai, approached the Crime Branch with his story, investigations led to arrests across the country. Agents Shamim Qureshi was picked up from Nagpada in Mumbai, Mohammed Hanif Qureshi from Palej village near Bharuch in Gujarat, Birendra Bisen from Balaghat in Madhya Pradesh and Manoj Gopche from Chennai. Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Rakesh Maria said the agents "lure people in desperate need for money with Rs 3-4 lakh for their kidney".

http://in.news.yahoo.com/071016/32/6m0u4.html