India has negligible acceptance of organ donations as compared to Europe, so taboos need to be broken
With just one per million cases of organ donation, India can fulfill all demands for saving lives with organ transplants. Organ donation in India remains a taboo because of ill-informed notions in the society. Dadhichi, as per the Hindu scriptures, was the first well-documented seer who donated his body out of which Vajra, the weapon of Indra, was made and used in the battle against the Asuras. That aside, awareness for organ donation is highly limited to certain sections of the society.
Eighteen months old Rishant was declared brain dead, but his parents decided that their son would live by giving life to kids who were battling for life for want of organs. His kidney gave a fresh lease of life to a boy, while liver was transplanted to a girl. This has rightly been hailed by the people, with the outpouring of emotions for Rishant, who now lives with two children.
But the situation about organ donation in India remains an abysmal state. There are two lakh people waiting for organs every year. The waiting list is indeed too long. India has 0.08 organ donors per million, while this is 34 for Spain, 27 for Britain, 26 for the US and 14 for Canada. In fact, every three minute one patient in India needs organs. The unfortunate state of the affairs results in not even 10 per cent of the patients waiting for organs getting them.
India reports 62,389 deaths each day, and the statistics suggest that if the dying people were to donate their eyes there would be no visually challenged person in the country. In fact, donation of one pair of corneas may help four persons. Sri Lanka has completely removed the corneal blindness through donations.
International working president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad Alok Kumar several years ago saw a skeleton in a medical hospital, which was highly venerated by the students, for he had been a professor there, who after seeing the paucity of bodies for study purposes donated his own upon death. Kumar was struck by the story, and he decided to set up Dadhichi Deh Daan Samiti, which over the years worked for the public awareness and got appreciation from former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former President ram Nath Kovind. The Samiti is now connecting with several NGOs across the country to give a major push to the wider acceptance of organ donation.
RSS veteran Nanaji Deshmukh and many stalwarts like him have donated their bodies after they passed away to help further medical research and studies. While India is seeking to scale up the capacity of the medical institutions, there will be greater needs for bodies to help medical students pursue their studies with facilities at par with the best in the world.
Indeed, there are a few taboos associated with organ donation. The spiritual gurus have a much larger role in rising to the occasion and addressing the issue at the national level so that social empathy becomes a popular virtue in the country.
While there are units for the organ retrieval in premier medical institutions such as AIIMS, there is a greater need for setting up more such centres, and possibly after exhausting them in the capitals attempts could be made for such infrastructure with trained manpower and the necessary equipment to come up in each district in the country.
Furthermore, there will also be a need to create a new platform for coordination and collaboration for the NGOs and the civil society to work together in promoting organ donation in the country, with principal focus in countering myths. Also, it will be befitting if there could be provisions for social commemoration for the people who have donated their bodies for the studies of the medical students at such institutions in some symbolic form could give a greater fillip to the campaign to promote organ donation.
Political leaders have set individual examples in leading the ways to promote awareness among the people for the need for donation of bodies and organs, but it will be more important that they take ownership of the campaign so that the social cause gains momentum to address the issue of extremely high waiting list for organs and also lack of bodies for the purposes of research at the medical institutions.
Some of the seers, political and corporate leaders have sought to give ownership to the issue, but there still exists a huge gap in the popular acceptance of the cause. Now that the National Education Policy 2020 is being adopted by the States, it may be worthwhile to examine if we can have a curriculum which can help greater sensitization of the children at the suitable stage of their studies.
(The author is Director, Public Policy Research Centre )