Selling organs to survive

By Damian Grammaticas
BBC News, Madras

Lata agreed to sell her kidney to feed her children

In a hot, bare hut in Tsunami Nagar in Madras, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, lives Lata Kala.

Two years ago when the tsunami destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean, Lata's fisherman husband lost his fishing boat and nets.

Desperate for money she sold her kidney a few weeks ago. A hospital in Madras (Chennai) cut it out.

She has an eight-inch-long scar, jagged and crossed with stitch marks. It stretches round her left side just above her hip. She is still in pain, unable to sit or stand for long.

"The doctor told me I will have breathing problems and back pain. If I lift heavy objects I will be breathless," Lata says, "but I agreed to it because I have debts and I have kids. Who will feed my children?"

So it is, more than two years after the tsunami that some survivors, still without permanent homes or jobs, have been resorting to selling their own organs to make ends meet.

Police are investigating at least a dozen cases where desperate tsunami survivors have sold a kidney on the black market for transplant organs.

Depressing

The BBC has been told that at least 30 more survivors were waiting to sell kidneys when the scandal was uncovered.

The sellers all come from fishing families who lost their homes and boats in the disaster. Tamil Nadu's government promised it would rehouse them within a year.

But more than 1,000 fishermen and their families, whose homes were destroyed by the tsunami, are still living in row upon row of identical white brick huts in Tsunami Nagar - a camp squeezed between a railway line and a power station in northern Madras.

It is a dirty, depressing place to be. Down muddy lanes naked children, pot-bellied, play in the mud. Televisions and radios blare out. Everyone lives cheek by jowl, right on top of each other.

Much of Tamil Nadu's fishing fleet was destroyed in the tsunami

The camp was meant to be temporary. It is six miles (10kms) from the port - too far for many fishermen to travel there and back every day to look for work.

Outside Lata's hut an elderly man came up and grabbed my hand, kissing it, begging for help. Another fisherman, he too lost everything in the tsunami.

All he wanted, he said, was a permanent home.

Even before the tsunami some poor fishing families had sold organs.

But Dr Paul Sunder Singh, the director of the charity Karunalaya, says their desperate situation now has made the tsunami survivors more vulnerable targets for the brokers who buy human kidneys.

"All these problems have provided opportunities for these brokers to come in and lure them saying you can help a patient and get a lot of money," he says.

Cheated

"Some were promised 100,000 rupees ($2,000), some 50,000 rupees ($1,000)."

But many who have sold organs say they were cheated.

We met six women, all complaining angrily. They had been offered from $1,000 to $2,000 each for a kidney. But the brokers had only delivered half the promised sum.

In Madras's main fishing market dozens of boats are lined up along the beach.

Fishermen pick through their nets taking out their catch. On the sea shore their wives are all busy bartering.

There are baskets full of prawns and sardines, a man holding a stingray by the eyes. Baby sharks and bright red snappers are lined up in rows.

The fishing families all used to live just yards from the seashore right behind the market.

Where their homes were, new buildings are going up to expand the port, but the government is refusing to let the fishing families come back here.

Instead, a couple of kilometres away new blocks of flats are being constructed. They are four stories high, clad in grey concrete.

'Trying our best'

All the families from Tsunami Nagar will be housed in the blocks. These flats are due to be completed in a few months, but that is already over a year behind schedule.

CV Sankar is the government official in-charge of relief and rehabilitation in Tamil Nadu.

"It is a problem, I can fully appreciate when the people say they should have been given a house earlier," he says.

"But we have tried our best to do it as fast as possible. The point I am trying to make is we are making very sincere efforts."

Back in Tsunami Nagar women queue to collect water from a tanker.

While they wait for new homes many fishermen are getting entangled ever deeper in poverty and debt. They are still unable to rebuild their lives.

Selling a kidney brings in the equivalent of three years wages. It is no wonder some have been tempted.