Mumbai: When 13-year-old Khansa Sayyed left Mumbai for Jalna on Saturday afternoon, she carried a new heart and the hope of returning to school next year. The child underwent a heart transplant at Fortis Hospital in Mulund on July 18, after a family donated their brain-dead son’s heart at a Pune hospital. She was discharged on Indian Organ Donation Day on Saturday after making an “exceptionally quick recovery,” said transplant surgeon Dr Satish Javali.Union health and family welfare minister Jagat Prakash Nadda, speaking at a function to felicitate organ donor families and state officials, announced that India achieved a milestone by performing 18,900 transplants in 2024. He stated that India is only behind the US and China in the number of transplants conducted annually.Despite this progress, lakhs of organ-failure patients continue to face long waiting periods for an organ. Khansa, for instance, received a heart after seven months of registering for a cadaveric or deceased heart donation. “My daughter went happily to attend the Independence Day parade at school last year, but was so exhausted and weak that she could never return to school thereafter,” said her father Rahim Sayeed, a vegetable seller from Badnapur near Jalna. She was diagnosed with heart failure and registered for a heart transplant at Fortis Hospital in January.At the Delhi function on Indian Organ Donation Day, union health secretary Nivedita Shukla Verma noted that India’s organ donation rate remains under 1% relative to the population. Over 63,000 individuals currently need kidney transplants, and around 22,000 require liver transplants, she said. In Maharashtra, more than 9,000 are awaiting a kidney donation. Verma highlighted the govt’s efforts to strengthen the transplantation ecosystem through NOTTO, which now has over 3.3 lakh registered donors.Meanwhile, in Mumbai, a volunteer who worked to create awareness about organ donation saved 10 lives when his family donated his organs. The volunteer, Kabir Mehta, 57, was declared brain dead after his brain aneurysm ruptured, and his family donated his heart, liver, kidneys, corneas, and skin at H N Reliance Hospital, Girguam, on July 29. Mehta and his wife, Dr Bijal, were part of the Shrimad Rajchandra Organ Donation Programme (SRODP) for over a decade and signed pledges years back.“Mr Mehta and his wife, Dr Bijal, were involved in spreading awareness about organ donation in Mumbai for over a decade,” said an official of the Zonal Transplant Coordination Centre (ZTCC), which coordinates the sharing of organs between various hospitals. Deceased organ donations have improved in the city, with 59 donations recorded in 2024. So far this year, 32 donations have taken place.
