From an obscure house in Gurgaon to a remote jungle resort in Chitwan, Nepal, where he has been finally nabbed, we have been through a horrific roller coaster ride with the man who is allegedly one of India’s leading kidney dealers. With almost vicarious fascination, we learn day after day of his enormous wealth, he was carrying hundreds of thousands of rupees as loose change when caught, and his palatial homes both in India and abroad. Of his fascination with luxury cars and failed beauty queens. Of his extensive contacts across the world where he found recipients for his gruesome racket. While this ghastly drama was unfolding, reports surfaced of the organised trade in blood right outside premier hospitals in the capital. As each scandal surfaces, we see the nefarious collusion between sections of the medical community and organ traffickers like kidney kingpin Amit Kumar. But that apart, the one piece in the macabre jigsaw that we rarely bother about is that of the victims. It is no secret that unscrupulous touts exploit the grinding poverty; and often illiteracy; of their victims in order to lure them to clinics where they are deprived of their kidneys. In the Gurgaon clinic that has been busted, we learn that at least 500 kidney transplants had taken place over the past few years. The question then arises, what happened to the donors? We can be fairly certain that they did not receive the requisite postoperative care without which the donor is condemned to a life of debilitating ill health and even early death. The police seem to have made no effort to trace these unfortunate people. In Chennai, the hub of the kidney trade in India, over 2000 people sell their kidneys each year. Many victims are trafficked from Nepal and once the deal is through sent back home. It is clear that there is also political pressure on the medical fraternity to either collude in or turn a blind eye to this illegal trade. According to 1994 legislation, a State-approved ethics committee must approve all transplants. But, as many tsunami survivors who sold their kidneys testified, getting around such committees was relatively easy. The testimony of the victims is crucially in the legal procedure against charlatans like Kumar. If it is proved that coercion was used to trap a donor, then the penalties are that much higher. The state that was [...]
Archive for February 26th, 2008
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IS THE NUCLEAR DEAL SKIDDING?
February 26th, 2008 
Tejinder So it is official now: time is running out for the India-US civilian nuclear deal. A three-man team of US senators led by Joseph Biden, who heads the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, disclosed this at a press conference in Delhi. Much water has flown down the Yamuna and the Potomac since Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W. Bush inked the deal in July 2005. It focuses on developing India’s civilian nuclear power programmes in exchange for placing its civil nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. Wire money online to India with Xoom.com for as low as $4.99. But controversy has dogged it from the word go, with detractors – chiefly the Left partners of the government – deriding it as a potential ‘sellout’ of India’s interests. The truth, of course, is that the Bush administration staked an unprecedented amount of political energy on this agreement, which represents a big change in US policy. Apart from revising domestic law, the US would have to convince its 44 Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) partners to waive guidelines prohibiting the supply of nuclear material or technology to States that don’t accept IAEA safeguards on all its nuclear facilities. Never mind India’s credentials as “a responsible State with advanced nuclear technology”. According to the deadline identified by the Biden team, the US Congress will only consider the deal if it reaches Capitol Hill before July. This effectively means that New Delhi must finalise the India-specific safeguards agreement with the IAEA and get the nod of the NSG in the next few months. In the event the US Congress doesn’t ratify it, the deal almost certainly runs the risk of being renegotiated by the next Congress. And going by the campaign rhetoric of the two Democratic Party presidential candidates, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton is likely to back a deal initiated by Mr Bush.There is no guarantee, either, that the Republican candidate John McCain will endorse President Bush’s overture towards India. So it would be unfortunate if the agreement were to fall through because of political reasons than due to any technical ones, as both countries have staked so much political capital on it. As many experts have pointed out, there are no technicalities in the deal that can’t be sorted out with more discussion, which makes it all the more a shame that critics oppose it just for [...]
