New Delhi:
Have you ever given a thought to organ donation? If not, then you should.
Every year about 85,000 patients of liver failure join India's wait-list for getting a liver but less than 3 percent are able to manage the same. There are two lakh fresh registrations for kidney every year, however only 8,000 are able to get the transplant. The odds are never in favour of thousands of people waiting for lungs or heart, as hardly one percent of them end up getting an organ at the required time.
Cadaveric organ donations in India have witnessed a four fold rise in the last five years. However, the gap between the demand-supply ration continues to a major cause of concern. As a matter of fact, the country witnesses more than 2.5 lakh deaths due to organ failure every year due to lack of enough cadaver donations. India has a population of over a billion people but its organ donation rate for the year 2016 was only 0.8 persons per million population. The rate stands nowhere to other countries. Spain and United States have a donation rate of 36 and 26 per million population.
There is a wide gap between demand and supply because organ donation and transplant programme is not very much in operation in all the states. Only ten Indian states and two union territories have such programmes. Though this is shocking but many states like Uttar Pradesh, Goa Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and the one in North-East still don't have an active donation programme.
Cadaver donation is yet to make a mark in the country because of lack of awareness amongst the people, misconceptions related to the same and political will. The procedure and formalities for organ donation consumes a lot of time and hence discourage people from being a part of it.
Many hospitals even don't have the necessary infrastructure to retrieve the organs. Hence, even when people are willing to donate, the lack of infrastructure leds to wastage of organs, which are already in shortage.
States like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana lead the way when it comes to organ donation. Delhi and Chandigarh also managed to have 30 donations last year.
