India's shame: People sell kidneys to beat starvation in West Bengal village

Editor's note: this story is based on a Times of India field investigation from February 2012. The original version of this article reproduced that reporting nearly verbatim; what follows is an original summary of what the reporting found.

The short version: In Bindol, an arid, impoverished village in West Bengal's North Dinajpur district — barely 35 km from the district headquarters at Raiganj — selling a kidney had become so common that locals called it the kidney village. Men were trading their organs for Rs 60,000 to Rs 1 lakh, then losing the ability to do the labor that fed their families. And the trade had started reaching the wives.

How the racket worked

Agents — dalals — connected desperate villagers with buyers. The Times of India's reporting named Razzak, an agent in the Bajbindol area whose relative prosperity stood in sharp contrast to the villagers he recruited, and Kuddus, another agent working the same trade. Donors received a fraction of what the kidney was worth in the wider market: one man, Jatin Jali, who sold his kidney through Razzak in 1998, was still regretting that he'd received only Rs 30,000.

The arithmetic of the trade was brutal. Lakshmiram Hansda, a landless laborer who had gone to Mumbai in 2000 for work that never paid, sold a kidney for Rs 80,000. The money fed his family for a few months. After the surgery, weakened and unable to work, he was left gaunt and abandoned — alive on an NGO's support, as the reporting described him, counting his days.

The spread

The trade was not confined to Bindol. Nearby Jalipara and Balia were affected too. Dulal Jali, a 32-year-old fisherman from Jalipara, sold a kidney in Kolkata four years earlier for Rs 1 lakh; afterwards, he could no longer stand the sun or haul a net — the very work that had fed him. Others frittered the money away: one villager admitted the Rs 1 lakh had gone to a motorcycle and vague recollections.

The ominous turn

By the time of the investigation, the tragedy had taken a darker shape: men who had sold their own kidneys were pressuring their wives to sell theirs. Astomi Malakar, married as a teenager, described being taken to Kolkata and admitted to a hospital — and coming home with a surgical scar on her back.

The NGO Sripur Mahila O Khadi Unnayan Samity was working with victims but fighting an uphill battle: when the choice is between slow starvation and a dangerous payout, awareness campaigns don't stand a chance. The NGO's workers said they had repeatedly complained to police about agents like Razzak and Kuddus. Razzak had been arrested two years earlier — and released within months. Nobody in the village dared speak against him.

Perhaps the most damning detail: some villagers had started seeing the agents as benefactors. Anita Jali, a homemaker in Jalipara, told the Times of India she was negotiating a better price — not refusing the trade.

Why it mattered

The kidney trade in Bindol was not a crime story so much as an economics story: it showed what absolute poverty does to a human being's options. India outlawed commercial organ transplants in 1994, but a ban on paper means little where starvation is the alternative. The real scandal wasn't that people were selling kidneys. It was that Rs 80,000 seemed like a good deal — and that for a few months, it was.