You don’t really need facts and figures to make a case for organ donation. Just ask yourself how many folks in your acquaintance have donated the organs of a deceased relative. Less than 200 families did so in 2012, India’s best year for deceased organ donation. For a billion-plus nation, that’s a pathetic number.
India is the diabetes capital of the world. Every year the pool of renal-failure patients who need a kidney transplant to stay alive swells by three lakh. An equal number suffer from failure of the heart, liver, lungs or intestines. Almost all the 4,000 kidney and 500 liver transplants carried out in our hospitals annually are the result of live donations by relatives. That means lakhs of organfailure patients will die this year because they won’t get a donor. Poor awareness, inadequate infrastructure and tedious procedures are only part of the problem. The absence of a national registry is the other big hurdle. Nineteen years after the Transplantation of Human Organs Act legalized the concept of brain death and deceased organ donation, we still lack a database that connects donors to recipients.
A good organ donation programme works on the principle that human organs aren’t owned by individual hospitals; they belong to society and should be shared fairly according to need. In countries where donor rates are far better than ours, a national registry forms the basis of the programme. Closer home, Tamil Nadu has set up an organsharing programme that has reduced red tape. While the central Act states that organs should be retrieved and transplanted in the same hospital, the state model allows non-transplant hospitals even nursing homes) to retrieve organs; these are then distributed to various public and private hospitals as per the state registry.
More than one lakh brain deaths occur in India every year. Even if they had all been donors, it would’ve been of little help unless those organs reached the right patient within the brief window of time open for transplantation. A national registry would be of immense help here.
The Union government last year put forth a proposal to set up the National Organ Procurement and Distribution Organization along with 10 state-level organisations. The idea was to have a national registry of organ-failure patients, grade them on the basis of their medical history and ensure the most needy patient got a donation wherever they may be. In an ideal scenario, organs retrieved in Chennai can be used for a patient registered in Chandigarh or vice versa. But we have neither the laws nor the budgetary allocations that will allow such action.
Our partner NGOs — Mohan Foundation, Shatayu, Gift Your Organ Foundation and Gift A Life — are in the forefront of the drive to expedite the issue and get a national organ-shar ing formula going that bridges the huge demand-supply gap and helps save many lives. The objective of our campaign is to give impetus to such efforts.
You can help too. Pledge your organs, discuss it with your family, petition your MP to bring changes in the law and spread the word online. Many lives depend on it.
