Plus the cost for dialysis is prohibitive at Rs 20,000 a month. Many patients go through a few rounds of dialysis only to never return. Doctors presume they are dead. Those who can afford it continue with the painful procedure for as long as seven to eight years.

So it’s not surprising that Adil’s brother Sarfe Alam says that if approached, he would have knocked on the doors of the illegal clinic in Gurgaon. “Anything, I would do anything. If I knew about the Gurgaon doctor, I would have certainly asked him for a kidney for my brother,” he says.

Experts say this is what the Human Organ Transplantation Act does not do.

“While it prohibits donors, it has no honourable alternatives for recipients,” says Harsh Jauhari, a leading nephrologist with Gangaram Hospital who is on the government panel reviewing the provisions of the existing Act.

The Act, passed in 1994, had two objectives: to curtail the kidney racket by introducing a rule that only a blood relative can be a living donor and to legalise the definition of “brain death”, hence encouraging “cadaveric organ transplants” — transplants from “brain-dead” bodies (where heart and lungs are active as distinguished from “cardiac death.”)

Once a person is dead, barring the eye, no other organ can be harvested. But as many as 37 organs, bone and tissue, can be harvested from a brain-dead body. According to one estimate, there are at least a dozen “brain-death” cases in each city each day.

... contd.