Corruption and apathy fuelled “Dr Horror” and his quacks
Wed, February 06 2008
By Mata Press Service with reports from IANS
|
Wanted: Amit Kumar and his brother Jeevan Rawat |
The call came around midnight on Jan 24.
Amit Kumar, the Indo-Canadian don of India’s Kidney Mafia had just stripped a pappu — poor victim — of his kidney at the racket’s secret operating theatre on the outskirts of New Delhi.
The man was one of three poor labourers who had parted with their kidneys over three days for a client who was willing to cough up C$50,000 to Amit Kumar for a successful transplant.
The men, if they were to be paid, would get between C$1,000 and C$2,500 each.
The client was brought to Amit Kumar by his curvy Greek girlfriend — one of the many brokers he used to build up his multi-million dollar global kidney bazaar.
Amit Kumar was not as worried about the impending police raid as the thought of losing a big payday.
After all, he had bribed his way out of police clutches before using an array of connections that stretched from India’s underworld to its political heights.
Finishing off what he had to do, Amit Kumar vanished before the police team arrived at his posh three-storey residence-cum-hospital in Sector-23, Palam Vihar, Gurgaon.
Mohammed Salim, who was rescued during the police raid, told local media that he was promised paid construction work, as well as food and lodging, but found himself held prisoner in a house where his kidney was removed against his will.
“I don’t know how I will survive,” he said from his hospital bed. “I am the only earner in the family and the doctors said I can’t do heavy work.” As the investigation continues, police say Amit Kumar, his brother and accomplices had performed over 500 illegal transplants.
They have implicated four doctors, five nurses, 20 paramedics, three private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and five diagnostic centres.
Interpol last week issued arrest warrants for Amit Kumar and his brother Jeewan Raut. Amit Kumar, 40, is suspected to have escaped to Canada through Nepal.
Some say he may have undergone plastic surgery in Kathmandu to make good his escape.
Depending who you talk to, Amit Kaur is a neprhologist, a cardiologist, a small-time Bollywood actor or a devious quack.
His racket was extremely well organised, secretive and tight-knit involving touts ranging from doctors in prestigious hospitals to cabbies and travel agents.
It is this cloak of secrecy and deception for nearly 15 years that has allowed Amit to thrive.
While the global hunt for him continues, the RCMP and Toronto area police have honed in on a Brampton suburb in Ontario, which his is Canadian home.
Amit Kumar was reportedly living in the predominantly Hindu neighbourhood of Bovaird Drive and Airport Road up until two months ago with his wife, Poonam, 28 and two young children.
His first marriage ended in divorce after a run-in with the law in 1994.
According to news reports, he bought a new, four-bedroom home on Pali Drive last April for $610,000 and neighbours said they last saw him just before Christmas.
Neighbours said Amit Kumar told them he was a cardiovascular surgeon, with clients around the world.
He never mentioned kidneys.
He was reportedly last seen in Brampton before Christmas driving a leased $65,000 Lexus 350 SUV.
Kumar told some people he was going back to India to wind down his businesses, which he said included a hotel, a hospital and several clinics.
He planned to open a hotel in Canada upon his return and was going to live and work here permanently.
Prior to his disappearance, Amit Kumar is believed to have operated under six aliases with matching phony passports,
Amit’s father Rameshwar Raut, now 93 years old, has disowned his son after he brought disgrace to the family.
“I had a misunderstanding with him and we have parted ways.
Everyone in my village knows about my integrity.
I am a freedom fighter and everybody knows this. He has made a mistake and put me to shame. One should never lie come what may. He was a big liar,” Raut said in Mumbai.
In a country where one out of every three lives in poverty, Amit Kumar and his ilk carved out a huge underground transplant industry.
After drugs controlling the body’s rejection of foreign tissues hit the Indian market in the late 1970s, he managed to set up a fake nursing home which, in the guise of an Ayurveda clinic, carried out transplants using unwilling, poor donors.
The Gurgaon doctor had first made his mark as a kidney racketeer — he then went by his real name Dr. Suresh Rameshwar Raut — in Mumbai way back in the ’80s. India was already the great organ bazaar of the world.
“Trade in human organs was legal in India. We were quite out of step with the rest of the civilised world,” says Dr. Samiran Nundy, who was a member of the Singhvi Committee that framed The Transplantation of Human Organs Act (THOA), 1994.
Amit Kumar was arrested in 1994 on suspicion of running a kidney transplant racket in Mumbai, but police say he jumped bail, changed his name and set up shop again near New Delhi.
Dubbed “Dr. Horror” by the Indian media where his story has led to nationwide revulsion, record checks in India show Amit Kumar is also wanted in similar cases in Jaipur, Guntur and Hyderabad.
Every time the law caught up with him, he jumped bail, changed his identity, opened shop elsewhere, eventually migrating to Canada.
“The beauty of Kumar’s outfit was that none of his cronies was fully clued in about the whole system,” said Manzil Saini, additional superintendent of police, Moradabad, who led the raids against the kidney mafia after being approached by a labourer who managed to flee Amit Kumar’s violent scouts.
“Donors were kept in the outlying woodland, while recipients were housed in his other properties in and around Gurgaon. Touts and assistants were briefed only about the work they were being paid to do,” he says.
A graduate of ayurvedic medicine from Akola, near Nagpur in Maharashtra, Amit, now in his early 50s, was first arrested in 1993 with 12 other medicos, including some from government hospitals, in a Mumbai police raid on Kaushalya Clinic in Khar, northwest Mumbai.
During his association with Kaushalya Clinic, the police reckon Amit carried out over 300 kidney transplants that generated Rs.450 million ($12 million).
That was his first brush with the law.
The following year, in August 1994, the Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch raided the clinic again following complaints of his involvement in a thriving kidney transplant racket, said a former member of the raiding party, Suhel Buddha.
“He secured bail and was back to his practice. Barely two months later, his premises were again raided by the police in a separate case,” recalls Buddha, who left the police force some years back and is now executive vice-president of India’s STAR TV. Following this raid, alarm bells began to ring. One patient, who had undergone a kidney transplant, did not get the obligatory post-operative care and died in the clinic, Buddha added.
According to another police officer, Manohar Dhanawade, who was part of the special squad that raided him in 1993, Raut came to Mumbai in the mid-1970s and ran a private consultation clinic in Khar before joining the Kaushalya Clinic.
“It was here that Amit made his impact with scores of foreign patients in need of kidneys and who were ever so willing to offer vast amounts to save their lives,” Dhanawade told IANS.
Amit — who was assisted in the racket by his brothers, Jeewan and Ganesh, who were not medically qualified but probably acted as agents to procure gullible kidney donors and needy patients — was once again released on bail. The lure of money was just irresistible.
Despite the meticulous efforts to book Amit, there were many in the police department who allegedly defended him in return for a hefty compensation, officials admit privately.
Nabbing him was difficult as he moved around and operated under false identities and procured fake passports.
Amit proved elusive even in the National Capital Region — Delhi and its environs — where he ran his unlawful activities.
Gurgaon Police Commissioner Mahender Lal said Delhi Police had arrested Amit in 2001 after a case of an illegal kidney transplant was registered against him at the Nizammudin police station.
A year later, a similar case was registered against him and an associate in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh.
A few years down the line, Amit shifted his base to Gurgaon, a rising IT hub on the outskirts of the Indian capital. Amit, along with his brother Jeewan and associates Upendra Aggarwal and Saraj Kumar, formed a well-oiled ring by including drivers and servants who worked as agents.
As the case unravels, Indian police are finding several different connections to Amit Kumar.
The Moradabad police said Upendra Kumar Aggarwal, an accomplice of Amit, revealed that a politician from Haryana had inaugurated Amit’s Gurgaon hospital Jan 26, 1997.
In his statement to police, Upendra also claimed that Amit, alias Santosh Rameshwar Raut, had links with an MP from Haryana, who purportedly bailed him out when his illegal trade came under the scanner of Income Tax sleuths in 2000.
The Moradabad police confirmed the figuring of several big names in Upendra’s revelations.
“We have given the names of several VIPs and bureaucrats as revealed by Upendra but we cannot disclose the names unless verified,” Assistant Superintendent of Police Manzil Saini told IANS.
Upendra, the key accused to be arrested in the case, also confirmed that the absconding mastermind of the racket had got threatening calls from gangster Chhota Shakeel.
Moradabad Senior Superintendent of Police Prem Prakash said, “Amit Kumar had also acted in several C-grade films and had even produced several of them.
“Upendra has revealed that Amit had also invested in various hospitals in Europe and Saudi Arabia. But he did not name the hospitals.”
Meanwhile, a Gurgaon court has sent a nurse identified as Linda, to 14 days of judicial custody to help in the investigations. Gurgaon police have also nabbed one more nurse, Rebecca, an alleged accomplice of Amit. She used to look after patients at his Gurgaon clinic where the illegal transplants were carried out.
three foreign and two Indian nationals. “She later left Amit and joined a hospital in Faridabad,” a police source told IANS.
Rebecca’s revelations are expected to help police form a strong case to nail Amit.
A potent mixture of apathy, a nexus of corrupt officials, loose medical laws and the desperation of rich patients in the West made Amit Kumar millions of dollars over 15 years.
Outside the Sector-23 posh three-storey residence-cum-hospital in Gurgaon, people may have noticed the swabs of cotton, blood-stained clothes, bandages and empty medicine packets/pouches thrown in two adjacent vacant plots.
But they never blew the whistle. “I have been supplying newspaper at the house for the past three years, but ignored the signs. Once I asked the guard, but he feigned ignorance,” said newspaper vendor Swapan Jana.
Wing Commander M.M. Marwah, a Sector 23 resident, said: “It is shocking news for all Gurgaon residents. Police had once raided and sealed the house a few years ago, but we don’t know how they (accused) managed to get it reopened. “We firmly believe that senior police are involved in the scam.”
Asked why the Residents Welfare Association (RWA) didn’t take any initiative despite suspicion that something was amiss, Marwah said: “We never had any interaction with the owner and at that time the RWA was also not fully operative.”
The lethargy in reporting the matter resulted in hundreds of people losing their kidneys and a massive scam that thrived in their community for at least three years.
“I have seen many foreigners — mostly above 40 — staying in the guesthouse. But they never interacted with anyone. The big iron gate of this three-storey mansion was only opened for a few select people and the three servants kept to themselves,” Satbir Kumar, a driver in the nearby house, told IANS.
“Before the police raids, we had always thought an international sex racket was flourishing in the house,” Kumar said.
Police threats and plain indifference colluded towards this colossal, exploitative racket, which now has spurred India to consider enacting legislation to outlaw quacks.
No one seems to know, however, just how many quacks — people who act like doctors and even do surgeries without valid medical qualifications — there are all over India. One estimate puts the number at a staggering one million. Some say this is a conservative figure. In Delhi alone, according to some officials and doctors, there are as many as 40,000 quacks operating from homes and clinics. Because of the high fees qualified doctors charge, a large number of poor people patronise quacks.
“The central government does not appear serious about the problem of quackery. The state governments too are not framing any laws against them. The need of the hour is to check the gory trade in human organs,” S.N. Mishra, president of the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the apex body of doctors, told IANS.
So, are there a million quacks in India?
“The number could be much higher,” said Anil Bansal, a member of the Delhi Medical Council. “We have several times asked for a survey to ascertain their number and to initiate action against them.”
He said the Delhi government drafted a bill in 1998, which the assembly approved with the rider that quacks be rehabilitated. But the bill did not see the light of day.
“The rehabilitation of quacks involved financial implications running into millions of rupees. So the bill could not take the shape of law as the Delhi assembly got dissolved,” he said.
Bansal, who is synonymous with the campaign against quacks in the capital, said that in 2000, former health minister C.P. Thakur was ready with a draft of an anti-quackery bill. However, it would not come up for discussion and approval in parliament. The ministry of health and family welfare is looking into the demand for such legislation. “It is at the discussion level,” a ministry official requesting anonymity told IANS.
Your reactions
