After dilly-dallying for years, India has finally joined many developed countries by giving people the option to pledge their organs while applying for a driving licence. A notification has been issued by the Union Transport Ministry recently, which ensures all new driving licences will clearly show if the owner has pledged to donate organs.
The move aims to boost the number of potential organ donors. Presently, organ donation in the country is just 2.26 per million despite higher rate of road accidents. In 2016, 4,80,652 road mishaps were reported, causing injury to 4,94,624 people and claiming 1,50,785 lives.
“If an individual opts for donating his organ, a symbol in the driving license will indicate his consent. This is the common practice in many countries including UK, US, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan,” said a senior official from the Health Ministry which had been pushing for inclusion for such a norm for the last few years.
The format of the current driving licence has been changed to include the organ donation consent.
However, while welcoming the much-awaited move, Dr Vimal Bhandari , Director of the National Organ & Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO) had some query on its implementation process.
Bhandari pointed out that since it is usually agents who fill the licence driving forms for the learners, the pledge will be based on what option they chose.
“It will not reflect the real choice of the learner. And since we know how casual the agents are we are keeping our fingers crossed. To earn quick bucks, they will be neither bother about the sentiment of their client nor take pain to ask them if they are keen for organ donation.
“So we are apprehensive how will it help in increasing organ donation in the real sense. To check the glitches, the government should take some concrete steps like sensitising the learners about the importance of organ donation. For instance, a short film encouraging organ donation can be shown to the learners before they attempt the test,” Bhandari said.
The NOTTO director also stressed on more awareness programmes so that pledges are turned into donations and called for promoting deceased donation (brain dead patients) to meet the demand as well as to check the black market. At any given point, there are 8-10 brain dead potential donors in ICUs of any major city.
Brain death refers to the irreversible end of all brain activity. Brain dead persons are kept on ventilators (artificial support) to ensure all organs remain oxygenated and healthy until they are harvested.
The Kerala Government has already taken a lead in the country by putting in place protocols to be followed to confirm brain death cases. The aim is to boost and make the organ transplantation more transparent. One organ donor can save up to eight lives by donating heart, two lungs, pancreas, two kidneys and intestine.