Organ donation is a practice twice-blessed

India today performs more than 18,000 solid organ transplants a year — more than any country except the US and China.

- Narinder Kumar Mehra

Yet, our organ donation rate stands at a mere 0.85 per million population, against 46 in Spain and comparable figures across much of the developed world. The unmet need exceeds 125,000 kidneys in India alone; add hearts, livers, lungs and other tissues, and the gap between supply and desperate human need becomes a chasm. Only a change in how ordinary citizens think about giving — and about what we owe one another — can bridge this gap.

Blood donation and eye donation have become almost routine. The next normalisation must be organ donation. If just 1% of adults in Delhi-NCR pledged to donate their organs after death, that would yield 300,000 potential donors. The entire kidney transplant waitlist of North India is smaller than that. What stands between those waiting patients and a second chance at life is the art of giving, not yet extended to its most profound expression, and not discussed adequately in Indian households.