The deceased donation programme in India in 2015 achieved an organ donation rate (ODR) of 0.5 per million population (pmp) [Table 1]. This is almost three times the rate in the year 2012. At this pace we should soon reach an ODR of 1 per million population. 

Table 1 : Deceased Organ Donation Statistics - 2015

Note

• The data projected in the above table is only provisional.

• The data for Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi-NCR do not reflect all the deceased donationsdone in the region.

If one were to look at the individual organs per million population, it is as follows for deceased donation [Table 2].

   Table 2: Brain Death & Organs Donated – 2015 

 Why is this trend healthy?

So far most of the deceased donations were coming from Tier-one cities with a few exceptions, but in the last two to three years, we have started seeing frequent donations from cities such as Puducherry, Trichy, Madurai, Thanjavur, Pune, Aurangabad, Nashik, Nagpur, Mangalore, Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Calicut, Indore, Jaipur, Surat, Vijayawada, and so on. These have certainly added to the overall growth of the programme so much so that heart and livers have been flown out of Indore, Aurangabad, Kochi and other cities when there are no local hospitals or patients available for such transplantation. The theme has always been not to ‘waste precious organs’ when they can save lives. What is important is to develop multi organ transplantation in some of these cities. Currently most of these  transplants seem to largely benefit patients from the private sector. What is important is for the Govt. to urgently consider having a private-public model in these tier-two cities so that patients from public sector hospitals too can get benefits. These transplants should be done at a subsidised cost by private hospitals or on par without consideration of any profits.