Earlier this month, the Union Health Minister, Jagat Prakash Nadda, highlighted how India had achieved a milestone that we can all truly be proud of. “Due to the unwavering dedication of our transplant professionals, India achieved a remarkable milestone of performing over 18,900 organ transplants in 2024, the highest ever recorded in a single year. This is a significant leap from fewer than 5,000 transplants in 2013. India ranks third globally in the total number of organ transplants, behind only the United States of America and China,” the Minister said on the occasion of the 15th Indian Organ Donation Day organized by the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO).

This is definitely worth praise—the number of organ transplants more than doubled from 7,443 transplants in 2020 to 18,910 in 2024. Number of organ donors were also up by almost 144% in those same five years.

While this is definitely a step in the right direction—to borrow Robert Frost’s words- we still have ‘miles to go‘ before we ‘can sleep.’ While there is a dearth of organised data, according to the NOTTO, 2.5 lakh people need kidneys, 1 lakh need corneas, 80,000 need livers, and 50,000 people need hearts every year in the country. In fact, officials have said that the donation rate in the country is less than 1% of the population.

Nadda highlighted the same in his address as well, underlining how there is an increase in organ failure cases that pose “a serious threat to public health.”

“Every year thousands of people wait for organ transplants. Despite the urgent need there remains a significant gap between the number of patients waiting for transplants and the number of available donors… This gap is not due to lack of willingness but often due to lack of awareness and hesitation rooted in the myths and misconceptions,” he added.

From ‘I am too old to donate organs’ (FACT: there is no cutoff age for organ donation; what matters is the health of your organs, not its age), to ‘my family will have to bear the cost of my organ retrieval if I sign up to be a donor,’ (FACT: The donor’s family does not have to pay for organ and tissue donation) it is once again misinformation that stops many people from signing up to be organ donors and poses a threat to public health.

First Check spoke to Dr Arvinder Singh Soin this World Organ Donation Day, who performed the first successful live transplant surgery in the country,  and he highlighted the need for more people to donate their organs. He summed it up perfectly when he said “please don’t take your organs to heaven. Heaven knows we need them here.”

Remember: each pledge to donate an organ, is a pledge to save a life. So let’s pledge to save lives!

And yes! I am happy to hear from you!