Recently a parliamentarian has revealed that there is a small village near Sargodha where around 10,000 villagers are living with one kidney each. These people are extremely poor labourers who work day and night on brick kilns. For some reason they took loans from their landlords.
To pay back the debts to local landlords, they have only one way left which is to sell their kidneys. Selling kidneys has become a business and a law was passed against it by the parliament almost a year ago. According to the law, this activity is banned and people involved in kidney business should be punished.
Some doctors were imprisoned too after the promulgation of the law but, unfortunately, the law has not been implemented in letter and in spirit in our country. The doctors involved in the criminal act of taking out the kidneys got bail and later set free. They must be once again involved in this heinous crime secretly.
This time a hospital in Rawalpindi has been exposed where doctors and paramedical staff were involved in kidney trade and making money by taking advantage and exploiting poor people’s miseries. They bought a kidney for about Rs 100,000 and then charged Rs 2.2 million for a kidney from patients who needed transplantation.
This dirty game is being played near the federal capital where all law-enforcement agencies, bureaucracy and politicians are based but nobody took action against these doctors. It is not possible that this unethical practice by doctors was hidden from the authorities concerned. I will request the chief justice to take strict stand against the doctors involved in this despicable criminal act.
ALI ZAIN
Karachi
