A leading international daily has made a shocking allegation at Delhi’s prestigious Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, naming it as being involved in an illegal kidney transplant racket. According to a UK daily, The Telegraph, the cash-for-kidney scam involved poor people from Myanmar giving their kidneys to rich people from the same country in exchange for money.
The Union government has asked the Delhi health authorities to probe the allegations. The National Organ and Tissue Transplantation Organisation (NOTTO) has also written to the Delhi State Organ and Tissue Transplantation Organisation to examine the serious allegation, take disciplinary action, and submit its report within a week. The UK Daily has also reported that a top surgeon from the hospital, Dr. Sandeep Guleria, has done the transplants. Dr. Guleria has denied the allegations, and the hospital too has responded by saying that the allegations are baseless.
According to the report, poor people from Myanmar were coaxed into the racket to sell organs for money by forging various documents and photographs to make the case look genuine. Both Indian and Myanmar laws forbid such kinds of illegal activities. Refuting the allegations, Indraprastha Medical Corporation Limited (IMCL), the parent company of the Apollo hospitals, said that the allegations are misleading, ill-informed, and false. It further added that they follow all legal and ethical guidelines laid down by the government for the procedures, and they have their own internal protocols too, with which they are extremely compliant.
The sources from the hospital further added that the stringent protocols at the IMCL require all donors to submit a notarized Form-21 from the respective ministries of their country, which is a certification from the foreign government that the donor and the recipient are relatives. The government-appointed transplant committee then examines each case and interviews the donor and the recipient, and further, the documents are revalidated by the embassy of the respective country.
The scam was unearthed by a reporter of the daily who posed as a relative of his sick aunt, who urgently needed to undergo a transplant but did not have relatives to do so. They then contacted the Myanmar office of the Apollo Hospital and were informed that the kidney would be sourced from an unknown person and that fake photographs would be submitted to the board to prove familial relations between the donor and the recipient. They were also given an estimate that the entire process would cost around 3000 euros.
The IMCL has added that they are committed to ethical standards for the transplantation procedures, which are of the highest standards, and continue to deliver on their mission to provide the best healthcare access to all individuals.
(Inputs from various sources)
(Rehash/Dr. Sushmita Ganguli)