It is poverty that has turned out to be the villain in the illegal kidney racket that surfaced in Dharmapuri on Monday. Enquiries revealed that abject poverty drove most of victims to sell their kidneys. Brokers, who allegedly kept a tab on the financial situations of the villagers, swoop in at times of crises and spot victims.
After the arrest of donor S Balasubramaniyam, a resident of Maniyampadi village in Dharmapuri district, his relative R Selvaraj said the man’s family was poor.
Balasubramaniyam, who was an electrical worker in a private shop in Sathyamangalam, due to extreme poverty borrowed money from relatives and friends He was distressed over the mounting debts and was desperately looking for a way out.
Alleged kingpin of the kidney racket, N S Ayyavu, who apparently sensed Balasubramaniyam’s bad financial situation, approached him a couple of weeks ago and explained to him that a person could live with one kidney.
Convinced by this, Balasubramaniyam agreed to donate one of his kidneys to P Ramesh of Podippatti in Udumalpet taluk. Police said many such illiterate villagers had been lured by brokers into selling their organs to clear their debts.
Meanwhile, in Namakkal, S Amsavalli, wife of one of the touts, R Srinivasan, claimed that her husband was innocent.
She rued that her family could not even afford to pay the charges to employ a lawyer for her husband.
However, fellow villagers said Srinivasan who goes by the nickname ‘Kattupoochi’, would disappear sometimes from the village. “Srinivasan could not be seen in the village at times. He would tell neighbours that he had gone to some far off place on some work,” said a villager.