By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : While there is outrage over Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala’s decision to hand over Amit Kumar to India without completing legal procedures, a Nepali victim says the kidney racket kingpin’s plans to move business to Kathmandu would have been a boon.
Rajendra Gurbacharya, a 60-year-old who was formerly consultant to Nepal’s national carrier, the then Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation, says Amit Kumar’s plan to start a kidney transplant hospital in Nepal would have come as a boon for hundreds of Nepalis suffering from renal failure.
With kidney transplants unavailable in Nepal due to legal complexities, Nepalis afflicted with kidney failure have to either settle for the painful and expensive option of dialysis or go over to India for a transplant where they are fleeced by unscrupulous touts and doctors.
“I lost two of my sisters due to the prevailing situation,” a mournful Gurbacharya told IANS.
“Their deaths could have been avoided if legal transplant facilities had been available in Nepal.”
Gurbacharya says fellow sufferers like him would have welcomed Amit Kumar’s initiative to open a kidney transplant centre in Nepal in accordance with the law.
“Amit Kumar did not kill anyone,” Gurbacharya said. “He gave a new life to hundreds. Is money more valuable than someone’s life?”
“Don’t people who make such laws (against kidney transplants) themselves go to Amit Kumar secretly when they are in similar plight?”
In 1991, Gurbacharya’s sister-in-law was diagnosed with kidney failure and the desperate family started looking around frantically for a donor.
Gurbacharya says at that time kidney transplants were allowed in India’s Chennai city and Nepalis were flocking there for a fresh lease of life.
According to him, when he went to Chennai’s Pandalay Clinic, there were several Nepali patients awaiting a transplant, including the husband of a prominent Nepali social service worker and the niece of a former prime minister.
“The hospital was offering a package,” he said. “You would get a kidney, the transplant and two weeks of bed rest after the operation.”
Besides the sum, the family also spent a small fortune going to Chennai and camping there for six months, awaiting a matching kidney.
“Donors would swarm to the hospital every day,” said Gurbacharya. “They were mostly poor villagers from Chennai.”
Finally, the family found a matching donor, a 30-year-old unmarried man, who said he was getting Rs.28,000 for his kidney. The man said he needed the money to marry off two sisters.
“If I have any money left after that, I’ll start a small business,” he told Gurbacharya.
However, two months after the transplant, the recipient collapsed.
“She had been given a pint of blood during the operation,” Gurbacharya said. “The blood carried the HIV virus. My sister-in-law died of that. We didn’t take any action against the hospital because we wanted to avoid the publicity.”
About seven years ago, the Gurbacharyas received a second blow when his own sister also developed kidney failure.
“Things were even more desperate since by that time, the Tamil Nadu government had declared kidney transplants illegal,” he says.
Gurbacharya advertised in the local papers, seeking a donor and was answered by a man who called himself Lama.
Lama was actually a middleman operating from the Putalisadak area of the capital to put people in Nepal in touch with hospitals in India running such operations clandestinely. By that time, the price had shot up to Rs.500,000.
The desperate Gurbacharyas were ready to pay the money and went to a Tamil Nadu hospital where Gurbacharya says a doctor called Ravi Chandran conducted the transplant.
However, his sister, a pathologist herself, died soon after the transplant as the Indian hospital had failed to match the kidney.
“Had this happened to an Indian citizen, wouldn’t people have raised canes?” asks Gurbacharya. “But how could we go on fighting against an institution in another country? So we dropped the idea.”