SAD: Villagers in India Embrace Kidney Trade in the Face of Extreme Poverty

A Nepalese village in India, Hokse, has been nicknamed ‘the kidney village’ as almost all its residents have sold at least one of their kidneys due to extreme poverty.

According to odditycentral, organ brokers regularly visit the village and its surrounding areas to convince cash-strapped locals to part with one of their healthy kidneys in exchange for a certain amount. The agents trick the villagers into travelling to Southern India to have the organs removed after first brainwashing them into believing that humans actually need only one kidney to survive and that the organ removed will grow back with time.

A mother of four, Geetha, said she was tricked into selling one of her kidneys for $2,000.

“For ten years people came to our village trying to convince us to sell our kidneys but I always said no,” Geetha said. However, as her family grew, her desire to provide them with a house got stronger and she succumbed.

She travelled with her sister-in-law, an organ broker, to India, and underwent the operation.

The procedure took only half-an-hour to complete, but she remained at the hospital for three weeks. “When I woke up after the operation I felt like nothing had happened and I was surprised that it was already done,” she said. “I was then paid 200,000 Nepalese rupees for my kidney and went home to my village to buy my own house and some land.”

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Unfortunately, the house she paid for with her kidney was destroyed in a deadly earthquake in Nepal on April 25.

The disaster left lots of villagers homeless, forcing them to turn to alcohol to drown their sorrows. And under the circumstances, organ trade has only flourished, turning the country into a ‘kidney bank’ of sorts. Although illegal, there are an estimated 10,000 black-market operations with up to 7,000 kidneys sold every year.