Organise a fair organ transplant regime

Launch of a real-time national organ transplant portal by National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO) is a much overdue and welcome move. A unified national waiting list, transparent organ allocation, Aadhaar-linked donor pledges, nationwide swap-matching and outcome-tracking promise to replace a fragmented system with one that is more accountable and equitable. By enabling hospitals to flag super-urgent cases and monitor patients through a common digital platform, the initiative addresses one of India's biggest transplant challenges: information asymmetry.

Yet, the portal also throws up deeper inequities that continue to define organ transplantation in India. Despite crossing 20,000 transplants in 2025 and becoming the world's third-largest transplant programme, demand still exceeds supply. More troubling is the gender imbalance. Women account for nearly 2/3rd of living organ donors, but receive a far smaller share of transplants, reflecting entrenched social norms. Geography, too, remains a barrier, with access to transplantation concentrated in a handful of states and urban centres. This resulted in a large black market and surrogate organ transplant economy.

Deceased organ donation must be strengthened through sustained public awareness, improving data transparency, expanding transplant capacity across underserved states, and routinely collecting sex-disaggregated data to expose inequities. Access to transplantation must be driven by medical need rather than socioeconomic privilege. The new portal provides the architecture. Now, policy must supply the equity. Every delay means another patient left waiting, another family pushed into despair, and another opportunity to build a fairer transplant system lost.