When Bal Mukesh Soni’s 19-year-old daughter died in a road accident in Ahmedabad, he did what very few people have the fortitude to do. He donated her kidneys, eyes, bone marrow and tissues. The kidneys gave a new life to a girl from Lucknow and though Soni lost his daughter, he feels, he now has another. The girl with new, healthy kidneys now lovingly calls him ‘Papa’. The kidney transplant was done by the Ahmedabad-based Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Centre (IKRDC), an autonomous medical centre.

While the Gurgaon kidney racket has shaken the country, an organised cadaver kidney transplant system is in place in Gujarat that ensures organ donation without any coersion, or touts involved. With 45 done last year alone, IKDRC conducts the largest number of cadaver kidney transplants from ‘brain dead’ donors. It has conducted more than 2,000 live kidney donor transplants so far.

Though the IKRDC, an autonomous medical centre, was set up in 1977, it started an awareness campaign for cadaver donations in 1995. Founded and headed by Dr H L Trivedi, it prodded the Gujarat Assembly to adopt the Human Organ Transplantation Act in the state in 1997. Dr Trivedi, a kidney specialist realised that there was no institute or hospital to do transplants at that time. “The number of patients in final stage renal failure is high and there was very little to help them,” Dr Trivedi says.

According to Dr Trivedi carrying out a large-scale cadaver organ donation programme is the only way of addressing the concerns of nearly a lakh end-stage renal failure cases each year. The donors usually register themselves with the centre in advance to donate organs in case of death. In case of sudden death, and if the person is not a registered donor, a network of hospitals, both government and private, across the state coordinate with the centre. With its hi-tech ambulances, the organs are transported to the centre.

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