A 61-year-old man’s request for a kidney transplant has been rejected, with the organ transplant authorisation committee finding holes in the application. The prospective donor’s documents have also come under suspicion, with the committee writing to the Gujarat government to ascertain their veracity.
The case became curiouser when two days after officials rejected the application, an anonymous email said it was indeed an attempt of organ trade for monetary gain.
While the Navi Mumbai-based senior citizen is suffering from end-stage kidney disease, the prospective donor, who claimed to be his nephew, is a Gujarat resident. One of the main points the committee found suspicious was that the man seeking the kidney was a senior executive and earned ₹82 lakh annually, while his nephew was a watchman and earned ₹2 lakh a year.
Said Gauri Rathod, nodal officer for the State’s organ transplant programme who is also part of the authorisation committee, “We don’t only look at the monetary aspects. We did not get satisfactory answers for several questions.” For example, she said the nephew was not seen in any photographs of the kidney seeker’s family functions, including his two sons’ weddings. He did not know the names of the children of the kidney seeker either. The only point that stood out was that they both had a matching human leukocyte antigen (HLA); the chances of two unrelated people sharing the same HLA is one in a lakh.
