Chandigarh: In March 2023, a kidney transplant racket was uncovered at Indus International Hospital in Dera Bassi, Punjab, India. The police have booked the hospital director, Dr. SS Bedi, and are carrying out raids to arrest him. The Punjab Medical Council has been informed about the action taken against him.
During the course of the investigation, the police found evidence indicating Dr. Bedi’s direct involvement and anomalies in nearly a dozen transplant operations carried out at the hospital. The prime accused and the hospital’s transplant coordinator, Abhishek Kumar, who was arrested in March, shared inputs that substantiated Dr. Bedi’s role in the racket.
Dr. Bedi’s house was raided by a police team, but he managed to escape. Three key conspirators of the racket, Hassan, Anmol, and Himanshu, are still evading arrest. The police are hoping that their arrest will provide further leads to understanding the network of the racket and the other states in which it is being operated.
The accused used social media to target donors and recipients for kidney transplant in exchange for money. They collected data of patients from clinics of nephrologists to target them. While most of the kidney recipients were from the tricity of Chandigarh, Panchkula, and Mohali besides other parts of Haryana and Punjab, the donors were from Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, according to a police official privy to the investigation.
The accused maintained a pool of donors, and once a matching recipient was found, the accused, including Abhishek, would forge documents to present the donor as a blood relative. The scam came to light after donor Kapil accused Abhishek of not paying him the promised money in exchange for his kidney. Kapil had posed as the son of the kidney recipient, Satish Tayal, 53, of Sonepat.
A case was registered against the accused under Sections 419 (cheating by personation), 465 (forgery), 467 (forgery of valuable security, will, etc.), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document or electronic record), and 120 (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code, and Sections 19 and 20 of the Transplantation of Human Organ Act (THOA) on March 18. The accused were arrested on March 19 and sent to judicial custody. Abhishek and his aide Raj Narayan have been arrested in the case.
The kidney transplant racket at Indus International Hospital has raised serious concerns about the regulation and monitoring of organ transplant procedures in India. The incident has also exposed the vulnerability of patients and donors who are often exploited by such rackets. The authorities need to ensure that strict measures are in place to prevent such illegal activities and protect the lives of innocent people.
