DEHRADUN: Kidney racket mastermind Dr Amit Kumar and his brother Dr Jeevan sought to exonerate themselves of any wrongdoing, saying that they did whatever they could do to “save lives” of innocent people.
After their arrest from Haryana’s Panchkula, the doctor siblings were presented before the media at the Dehradun SSP office here on Saturday,
“I told him (Amit) many times why do you care for patients and get into this…but then they (patients) used to come begging for their lives,” Dr Jeevan Kumar told the media, referring to how hospitals declined take up transplant cases of renal patients owing to strict rules.
Every year in India, around two lakh people get listed for kidney transplants but only about 7,500 receive an organ. Of this, less than 1% is from organ donation by families of brain dead patients, according to the National Organ and Tissue Transplantation Organisation (NOTTO), a national level transplant network.
“A woman once came with her only child (a critically ill kidney patient) whom she had taken to many hospitals, but none was ready to operate him...he was about to die that’s when he (Amit) said, ‘I can save his life in half an hour (by transplanting a kidney on him)’.”
{{/usCountry}}“A woman once came with her only child (a critically ill kidney patient) whom she had taken to many hospitals, but none was ready to operate him...he was about to die that’s when he (Amit) said, ‘I can save his life in half an hour (by transplanting a kidney on him)’.”
{{/usCountry}}Nodding, Dr Amit confessed that the brothers began operation at the private hospital near Dehradun in July and that they had carried out around 50 surgeries, including on foreigners, since then.
“We used to give Rs 4-5 lakh to donors and charge Rs 25-30 lakh from patients (on whom kidney transplantation was performed). We used to get the important medical tests (for matching kidneys among others of donors and recipients) done in Delhi,” the kingpin said.