Cabinet may amend organ transplant law

The Union Cabinet on Thursday may consider key amendments to the Transplantation to Human Organs Act, 1994, disallowing foreigners to get organs from Indians, increasing penalty for violators by up to 10 times and allowing swap organ donation.

Updated on: Sep 17, 2009, 24:27:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Union Cabinet on Thursday may consider key amendments to the Transplantation to Human Organs Act, 1994, disallowing foreigners to get organs from Indians, increasing penalty for violators by up to 10 times and allowing swap organ donation.

The government started the process of amending the law in 2008 after Dr Amit Kumar was arrested for running a kidney transplant racket in his two hospitals in Gurgoan. Kumar reportedly used to remove kidneys of poor labourers from UP and sell them at high price to Indian and foreign customers.

The proposed amendment aims at registration of all hospitals and clinics specifically for organ transplant. It also speaks about creation of a special authority in each state to regulate the registered hospitals for organ transplant and investigate the complaints of foul play.

Donation to foreigners by Indians as done in the Gurgoan case has been debarred in the proposed amendment.

To bring clarity in donation of organs by “near relatives”, the proposal says grandparents and grandchildren, in addition to wife and children, should be included but not uncles and aunts as suggested by a government expert committee. The amendment is set to make swap donation between two patients, notified by doctors, a possibility.

To improve the pool of organs for donations, the health ministry has suggested that hospitals should ask a patient whether he would like to donate his or her organs at admission as done in the US. The ministry had also proposed to create a national registry of beneficiaries of organ transplant and a network of hospitals for organs available for donation.

The proposal also entails to increase fine from up to Rs 50,000 to Rs five lakh and imprisonment from current 3 years to up to 5 years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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