The death of Union minister Vilasrao Deshmukh will not have been in vain if it spurs greater awareness on organ donation nationwide. Last-ditch efforts to save him led his family to seek out Tamil Nadu’s regulated organ donation system, where strict rules apply to stanch rackets run in the name of finding suitable donors for the rich and powerful.
While Deshmukh’s promotion to “emergency status” to beat the queue is deplorable, and well illustrates India’s “VIP culture”, his condition at least brought out the need for compassionate sequencing of donations depending on patients’ needs. While death is a great leveller, any attempt to save lives is laudable.
It is certainly questionable if a minister’s life is worth more than that of thousands of patients who wait for organs in a highly complicated process; with unprincipled body parts salesmen having run riot all over India depriving and cheating the poor by luring them to sell one of their kidneys. But looking beyond the narrow question of queues and priorities, what this case highlights is that society must find ways to save lives by encouraging organ donations by families who must allow body parts of their kin, who have pledged their organs, to be harvested even if bereavement is already so painful as to rob them of clear thinking.
Artificial organs lie so far into the future that it is more science fiction than practical medicine. Meanwhile, the best we can do is tweak the system to make the rules and regulations more humane.