Many clients from Sri Lanka for India’s kidney racket

The illegal kidney racket unearthed from Gurgaon and Moradabad shows how the human organs business in India has never been busted successfully. Instead, it continues to show up in new sites, often with old hands circulating through smarter operations.

As the motives and modus operandi remain the same, a look at sensational clampdowns in the recent past in Chennai, Punjab and Andhra Pradesh reveal how the dark ring operates with police cover and impunity as predators in impoverished and desperate communities.

In the south, Chennai has earned unmatched notoriety in illegal kidney trade. In January 2007, investigations into suspected kidney rackets revealed that kidney brokers supplied to hospitals in Chennai, Madurai, Tiruchi, Tirunelveli and Coimbatore which allegedly had clientele from Sri Lanka and West Asia. It is still not clear how long the Chennai racket had been operating.

According to reports from domestic and foreign press, however, it was mainly after the tsunami of December 2004 that the case came under Government and public gaze.

It is now well-known that Maria Selvam, a resident of Tsunami Nagar, a village ravaged by the tidal wave, perhaps first spoke up against the long-standing kidney racket before officials.

But exposing the racket was never his primary aim. Speaking to freelance journalist Scott Carney, Selvam said his plea to the government was for basic facilities so that hapless villagers could regain their livelihood.

When no one seemed to be interested, he decided to make his plaint a shrill one, and hence hit upon the kidney transplant scam.

The police investigation of the racket that followed was fuelled in large measure by Selvam’s charges, and what came to light was nothing short of shocking, perhaps even ominous, in the context of the current kidney scam unfolding upon the scene.

In the three months since probes in Chennai began in January 2007, the investigative radar went beyond Tamil Nadu borders and included 52 hospitals across the country. Two facilities had their licences revoked, while 13 continue to be under investigation.

In the market, where a kidney costs Rs. 1.5 lakhs, Chennai’s tsunami victims have been known to receive a wretched Rs 40,000.

One tsunami-hit village is locally better known by the name of ‘Kidneyvakkam’ or kidneyville since reportedly 90 survivors came forward with charges of organ fraud by brokers.

In fact, so target rich is the field there that at least two US-based journalists were spurred to move to Chennai when they first heard of the racket.

Today, the work of Scott Carney, a freelance journalist and Samantha Grant, a documentary filmmaker, has become something like a referential benchmark as they chronicled not just human stories but facts about involvement of money and officials in the racket. In one such report, Carney wrote that although a few hospitals closed shutters, “...the crackdown has spurred a backlash from politically connected suspects that could put legalisation back on the legislative agenda.”