00:00 Hello everyone this is Aminah Ansari welcome to HW News English
00:04 The list of people waiting to get donors is getting longer and longer. Is there a shortage
00:10 of donors in our country or is there something else? In Mumbai itself, 4000+ patients are
00:16 waiting for organ transplant where if we go by records, only 200 out of 4000 may secure
00:23 a donor by the end of the year. According to data, the number of transplants only grew
00:29 from 6,916 in 2014 to about 16,041 in 2022. If we go through the data from 2014 to 2022
00:39 further, the number of liver donors only increased from 1,327 to 3,911. Kidney donors only increased
00:50 from 5,512 to 11,705. Heart donors from 53 to 243 and lungs donors from 15 to 144. According
01:03 to reports, one person is added every 10 minutes to the waiting list of organ transplant. Though
01:09 the health ministry has announced a series of steps to promote organ donations which
01:14 also includes doing away with the domicile rule, removal of age bar for registration,
01:20 removal of fee for registration for transplant, easing the rules on withdrawal of life support,
01:26 facilitation of organ transport across the country. In India, transplant and donation
01:32 comes under the Transplantation of Human Organ and Tissues Act of 1994. Under this act, removal,
01:39 storage and transplantation of human organ can only take place for therapeutic purposes.
01:46 The act prevents commercial dealing in human organ i.e. organ trafficking. According to
01:52 reports, in India, a huge gap exists between patients who require organ transplant and
01:57 the organ donors that are available in the country. The Indian government has implemented
02:03 a national organ transplant program to promote organ donation from deceased persons to increase
02:09 the availability of organs for transplantation. This aim with this program was to bridge the
02:15 gap between demand and supply of organs. The challenges with the patients in India face
02:20 is that they have to wait for years to get an organ. The one who suffers the most in
02:25 this long waiting list is the poor. Another challenge is organ trafficking, which means
02:30 that human organs are illegally acquired by fraud or force or by any other illegal means
02:36 for money exchange with third parties. According to reports by Justice Upheld, there is not
02:42 much data available regarding whose organs are removed. It is also very difficult to
02:48 trace the seller. The report says that these organ sellers are mostly from the urban slums
02:53 and poverty-prone districts. Organ trafficking is one of the most severe areas of exploitation
02:59 in India. Low supply and high demand for organs has led to the crime of organ trafficking.
03:06 Let me tell you about a well-known case of organ trafficking. Dr. Amit Kumar, who has
03:12 made around 500 illegal transplants before his arrest. The foreign labourers were treated
03:18 as live donors with the promise of being paid Rs 3 lakhs. It was alleged that Amit Kumar
03:25 had charged approximately $50,000 for each operation. He was arrested later in Nepal.
03:33 The report by Justice Upheld further revealed that organ harvesting is continuously growing
03:38 at an alarming rate. And this organ trafficking is likely to further increase in India in
03:43 coming years. The report says that brokers, doctors, transplant centres and drug companies
03:49 are the main beneficiaries in the kidney trade, which is even more than the kidney buyers.
03:55 The same report reveals that organ trafficking happens mostly through 5-star hospitals who
04:00 offer transplant tourism services. Now the question arises, if nobody, then who can solve
04:06 the challenges of human organ donation and controlling the organ trafficking? It is none
04:12 other than our Indian government. It is the duty and responsibility of the government
04:17 to fill the loopholes which exist in the whole process and make the strict laws against organ
04:23 trafficking.
04:24 That's all for this news report. For more such news and updates subscribe to HW News
04:29 English.
04:29 [music]
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