NOTTO Director Highlights Severe Organ Transplant Gap at Okhla Event
At a joint awareness event hosted at Fortis Escorts in Okhla on Tuesday, Dr Anil Kumar, director of the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), outlined the stark scale of India’s organ transplant crisis. Speaking ahead of World Organ Donation Day on August 13, Dr Kumar revealed that the country faces a critical shortage of deceased-donor organs, creating a massive gap between the number of patients requiring lifesaving surgery and those who receive transplants.
Addressing the gathering in Okhla, Dr Kumar shared specific national figures demonstrating the annual deficit. Each year, approximately two lakh new kidney patients, 50,000 liver patients, and 50,000 heart patients are added to the pool of individuals needing organ transplants. However, the number of operations conducted annually falls far short of these figures.
Against the growing list of patients, India performs around 14,500 kidney transplants, over 5,100 liver transplants, 239 heart transplants, and over 200 lung transplants each year. In addition to these procedures, Dr Kumar noted that there remains an unmet demand for both pancreas and intestine transplants across the nation.
While the number of newly added patients and the number of completed transplants serve as different measures, Dr Kumar emphasized that these statistics illustrate an enormous mismatch between potential need and transplant capacity. He stated that the crisis is driven not simply by a lack of transplant facilities or qualified surgeons, but fundamentally by a shortage of donated organs.
Dr Kumar also noted that living donor transplants cannot resolve the deficit on their own. A living donor can only donate a single kidney or a portion of their liver, and living organ donation carries inherent, though minimal, surgical risks.
The collaborative event organized by NOTTO and Fortis Escorts in Okhla aimed to raise public awareness about organ donation, focusing specifically on the urgent necessity to increase deceased-donor donations to address the national shortage.
