Missing Links

Getting an organ transplant in India comes with its set of challenges—lack of donors and adequate infrastructure, high costs and transport hassles.

- Namita Kohli

A heart transplant is to heart failure what lottery is to poverty. Noted American cardiologist Dr Arnold Katz's analogy seems apt if one were to glance through the data on organ transplants in India— only a few hundred heart transplants are done each year, while 50,000 patients remain on the wait list.

For a procedure considered 'gold standard' for patients of end-stage heart failure, the numbers are dismal. “Waiting lists with the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation [NOTTO] run into several years, and many patients die during that period,” says Dr Ajay Kaul, chairman and head, cardiothoracic and vascular surgery, BLK Super Speciality Hospital, Delhi.

The numbers are no different when it comes to the more common transplant—kidney. Though, unlike the heart transplant, where the organ must come from a deceased donor, for a kidney, or even the liver, a live donor is possible. Even so, the gap between demand and supply is huge—about 3 lakh patients are in need of a kidney transplant at any moment. At a premier institute such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, only about 150 kidney transplants get done in a year, though a private hospital such as Delhi's Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals does 600 transplants in a year.

In April, issues with organ transplants in the country came to the fore when news broke of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's possible kidney transplant at AIIMS. There was outrage over the minister “jumping the queue”—at least 400 patients, who have also managed a live donor, are on the AIIMS wait list for a kidney transplant. Initially though, the minister's transplant procedure had to be cancelled because of a “mismatch” between the donor and the recipient. He subsequently got a transplant done on May 14, and on June 4 tweeted about being back home.