Free The Red Market by Scott Carney

eyeballs from the images on their walls. His crime: Trying to stop the flow of organs out of Tsunami Nagar.
    “It used to be that only one woman a month would sell a kidney to a broker, but lately it has gotten a lot worse,” Selvam says. “Now it’s two women a week, and I know I have to do something.”
    While we talk a woman in a blue and highlighter-yellow sari frowns at him from across the courtyard. She looks like she is in her midforties, but I suspect that rough living in an Indian slum might mark her closer to thirty. The edge of a foot-long scar crests across her exposed abdomen over the fold in her sari. Selvam tells me that just about every adult woman here has a scar like that. “I haven’t been able to stop a thing,” he says.
    Weeks after the wave swept away his village, the government relocated the twenty-five hundred residents from their fertile fishing grounds to this worthless patch of land. The settlement is next to a giant power station that pumps electricity to Chennai, and yet power outages are still common here. The villagers’ needs are modest: they want fishing nets and a small three-wheeled rickshaw so that the fishermen can haul the community’s catch to market. Ever since they were relocated, Selvam has lobbied the high courts to send the cash and resources they promised.
    His pleas fell on deaf ears until January 2007, when he had had enough. That was when he decided to play the only card he had left at a meeting scheduled to take place in front of one of Chennai’s most powerful high-court justices.
    The plan was simple enough. By using the testimony of poor women who were forced to sell their organs, the court would be shamed into finally administering aid. After all, how could the court not empathize with his village’s plight once it learned about the level of desperation fostered by government inaction.
    In a crowded community hall the judiciary listened to Selvam’s breathless testimony and the stream of courageous women who volunteered their stories. They said that kidney brokers had always been a problem—even before the tsunami—but now they were relentless. They showed their scars and Selvam waited eagerly for the judge to open up the state’s coffers.
    Things didn’t go according to plan. The judge listened carefully, but the aid was tied up in India’s obscene bureaucracy, not because of a lack of judicial will. To make matters worse, the five hundred men and women in the audience nearly rioted when they realized that Selvam had betrayed their secret. Showing the women’s scars shamed the entire village. Everyone knew that they were poor, but being poor enough to sell organs was another thing. Youths shouted that he had dishonored the women of his community by exposing what they felt should have been a private matter.
    The revelation didn’t push the government into sending the camp the nets and vehicles he requested. All it did was expose the village’s dirty secret to the press. Local newspapers began covering the scandal, and soon the state’s Department of Medical Services uncovered evidence that fifty-two Indian hospitals were involved in what amounted to one of the country’s largest coordinated organ thefts ever.
    Even though Selvam had failed in his goal, the investigation was an opportunity to turn the tide against the practice of kidney selling and bring brokers and corruptible health officials to task. Public outcry against the scandal forced the state-level ministers to form an offical response.
    The job fell to Tamil Nadu’s health minister, K. K. S. S. R. Ramachandran. 10 A former political party street tough who is known by the impenetrable string of initials in front of his name, he earned his stripes with the government after a political rival threw a jar of acid in his face. (The scars make him noticeable at party meetings.) To the surprise of locals he forwent police action. Rather than try the issue in the courts, he planned to resolve it