- Tuesday, February 25, 2025
It has been alleged that poor people from India’s eastern neighbour of Myanmar are being allured to donate their vital organ to rich ‘clients’ for money, flouting laws.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Telegraph daily of the UK has published an explosive news alleging the involvement of India’s prestigious Apollo Hospitals groups in illegally buying kidneys from poor people of the eastern neighbour of Myanmar after enticing them and using the vital organs for wealthy patients coming for surgeries from all over the world, including the UK.
The multi-billion-dollar hospital company boasts of conducting more than 1,200 transplants annually.
An investigation by the UK newspaper revealed that desperate villagers from Myanmar, a country which is plagued by political and economic challenges, are being taken to Apollo’s hospital in Delhi and paid money to donate their kidneys to their ‘clients’ — rich patients from their own country.
Paying for organs is illegal in India, as it is across most of the world, but a Telegraph investigation has revealed that desperate young villagers from Myanmar are being flown to Apollo’s prestigious Delhi hospital and paid to donate their kidneys to rich Burmese patients.
One of the kidney racket’s ‘agents’ told an undercover reporter from the daily that the business is “big”. It was also told that those involved in the business work in tandem to get around the hindrances between the governments of the two countries.
The procedure involves forging of identity documents and showing ‘family’ photographs to introduce the donors as relatives of the recipient patients, the report said.
Laws in both India and Myanmar bar a patient from receiving an organ donation from an unknown person under normal conditions.
Reacting to the claims, Apollo Hospitals said it was “completely shocked” and would carry out an internal investigation. It denied engaging in any “implicit sanctioning of any illegal activities relating to organ transplants”.
He also dismissed a 2016 report by an Indian daily claiming that he was expected to be summoned for questioning in relation to another kidney scandal linked to Apollo’s hospital in the Indian capital.
The UK daily came to know about the ‘cash for kidneys’ racket first through the case of a 58-year-old patient Daw Soe Soe who reportedly spent 8 million Myanmar kyat (£31,000) to get a new kidney in September last year. The surgery was allegedly done at the Indraprastha Hospital, Apollo’s flagship hospital in Delhi and the donor, according to Daw, was a complete stranger. She also said that in Myanmar, they were taught by the agent to tell that she and her donor were kin.
It was then when a Telegraph reporter posed as the relative of a sick woman who urgently required a kidney transplant but had no family member to come to her aid. When they approached Apollo’s offices in Myanmar, they were told that a stranger would be brought to donate the organ.
It was also told that finding a donor was not a big deal.
An individual associated with Apollo told the daily that 80 per cent of transplantations facilitated in Myanmar are between strangers and only 20 per cent between relatives.
“The reporter was then introduced, via Mr Phyoe and a female agent, to a 27-year-old man from the outskirts of Mandalay who said he needed to sell his kidney as his elderly parents, whom he lived with, were ‘not in a good financial condition’,” the report added.
It added that the agent, who was present for the talks, said it would cost around £3,000 for the man’s kidney and that she had been making arrangements for such donations for the last five years.
He also shared with the reporter an Apollo-branded costs document which detailed a range of expenses linked to the transplantation – from the drawing up of a family tree (£315) to flights (£200 each way) and “registration for the medical board” (£160).
A Myanmarese doctor, described as the head of Apollo’s operations in the Southeast Asian nation, also shared with The Telegraph reporter the amount a transplant patient can expect to pay in total and it is upto £17,100 which, however, doesn’t include the money the donor received.
While Apollo expressed its shock, one of the recipients of the kidney told the UK daily that it knew about everything but still pretended to overlook it.
The shocking revelation has also made the Indian authorities to make move. SB Deepak, a top Indian health and family welfare official, told the Times of India that they were launching an inquiry into the claims. Dr Anil Kumar, director of the National Organ and Tissue Transplantation Organisation, also said that they and the health and family welfare ministry will probe the allegations.
Kidney trafficking is a thriving business in India.
In 2016, police arrested five top doctors from the elite Dr LH Hiranandani Hospital in Mumbai, including its chief executive and medical director, for their alleged role in an organ-harvesting racket and took kidneys from poor villagers, Quartz reported.
The police acted on a tip-off from a hospital employee and uncovered the racket in July the same year after bursting a suspect surgery wherein a woman was to donate her kidney to her husband. It was discovered that the woman was a poor villager from the western state of Gujarat and a complete stranger to the recipient.
The Indraprastha Apollo Hospital was also entangled in a kidney racket in 2016 when two of its secretariat workers were arrested along with a number of brokers and donors. A probe into the accused is still underway. Apollo had said at the time that it was “a victim of a well-orchestrated operation to cheat patients and the hospital” and it was cheated by traffickers into removing kidneys of victims believing they were relatives of recipients in need.
In January this year, Myanmar’s Frontier Myanmar magazine reported that more and more people from the country were selling their kidneys to find a way out of poverty and debt, with many donors going to neighbouring India for transplants and telling lies so that they are not caught.
