Non-profit charitable trust MOHAN Foundation has been fighting for the cause of organ donation in the country for more than the last two decades. Lalitha Raghuram in a tete-a-tete with IndiaMed Today, talks about the foundation’s journey and how it has helped to create social awareness about organ donation in India.
By Team IMT
Organ donation has become legal since the time when The Transplantation Of Human Organs And Tissues Act, was passed in 1994. “People can donate organs within the family after one is deceased and when one is brain dead. Though organ donation has become legal and it has been more than 25 years since the act was passed, the awareness about the same is still at a nascent stage. If you look at the South and the West of the country, states like Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala,
Tamil Nadu, have more organ donations than the rest of the country. Originally Tamil Nadu did well followed by Maharashtra and Gujarat,” says Lalitha Raghuram from MOHAN Foundation.
A brain dead person donating organs can give a new lease of life to nine people where lungs, kidneys, heart, pancreas, intestine, tissue-like eyes, heart valve can also be donated.
Says Raghuram “Don’t burn or bury the body, donate organs and give life to as many people as possible.” With little awareness, the organ donation rate in our country is 08 per million of the population.
Chennai-headquartered Mohan Foundation was founded in 1997. Apart from Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Nagpur, MOHAN Foundation has information centres in Thiruvananthapuram, Goa and Manipur in the North East. The organisation receives funding from philanthropists, corporates and individuals. The foundation doesn’t charge anything for the organs that are donated and receive anything from the recipients.
Raghuram mentions, “We started with kidney transplantations and now we doing lung, heart, liver transplants as well. Things are happening routinely and the success rate is pretty good. Though things have changed for the better with modern transplant medicines and doctors being trained abroad who are conducting transplants back in the country, the only challenge is to procure donor organs. A lot of patients are on the waiting list in need of organs.”
According to the government registry in Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Kerala, Maharashtra, the list of people waiting for organ transplantation is huge. MOHAN Foundation is actively promoting deceased organ donation and the tag line says, “No Indians should die for want of organs.”
Building an awareness campaign is the need of the hour. The foundation works in the hospitals and with the help of doctors, NGOs like MOHAN Foundation are notified who then approach the patient party to counsel them. The challenge, in this case, is that doctors need to be more aware of declaring a brain dead person on time so that a family can be counselled and the organs can be retrieved on time.
Raghuram adds, “We do a lot of ICU workshops for intensive care doctors, the documentation and the legalities. Currently, we are conducting a lot of sensitisation workshops across the country.”
She further says, “Around 90 per cent transplant happens through living donation where the near and dear ones can donate the organs. If there is no family member then people start looking out for suitable donors. In the case of unrelated donation, every state has an authorisation committee. The committee has to give approval that any other person can donate without any fees. In desperation, sometimes in connivance with the authorisation committee, people end up doing illegal activities fall prey to rackets.”
According to Raghuram, the only long-term solution is to stop illegal activities/crimes is to promote deceased organ donation. The COVID-19 pandemic had taken a toll on organ donation across the country. Almost for three-four months, the entire transplantation procedure came to a standstill. With the entire focus on the deadly virus, the central government issued a notification to stop all organ donations.
National Organ & Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO) came up with guidelines on how to go ahead with organ donations during the COVID pandemic, which tests can be done on the donor etc. All these led to a dip in organ donations as nobody wanted to take any risk. From September onwards, things started at a slow pace.
MOHAN Foundation conducts four or five activities to create an awareness campaign. National public education programme, a lot of face to face meeting, public education at schools and are some of the initiatives undertaken.
Says Raghuram, “With the help of the online platform, our mission is to reach millions. Musicians, folk artists, Twitter and YouTube medium are some of the mediums which help the NGO reach out to the masses.
