Fears and myths still hobble India's organ donation story

Lakhs of Indians need organ transplants, but less than a 1,000 transplants are performed each year. The rest are condemned to die waiting for an organ as there aren't enough donors.
Last year, TOI's Organ Donation Day campaign motivated thousands to register as donors in a span of just nine days. However, the lack of a National Registry -a database of people who are willing to donate their organs after their death -was a hurdle for organ donations to happen.
Moreover, the level of awareness about the process of volunteering to donate organs is very low as revealed by an eight-city survey commissioned by TOI in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune.Though almost half the respondents expressed their willingness to donate organs, few knew how to do so. Delhi had the lowest proportion of respondents willing to become organ donors.
Quite predictably , Chennai with a large number of organ donations and a successful and much-publicised organ retrieval and transplant programme, fared the best among all the cities on almost all counts in the survey . The Kolkata respondents were the least aware. There wasn't much variation in the level of knowledge or ignorance between genders, age groups or economic classes.
Not many concerns were expressed about organ donation, but among those who did, fears about their own treatment getting affected were dominant. Over half the respondents in Chennai expressed the concern that a patient might be prematurely declared brain dead to retrieve their organs. Almost one in five respondents in both Chennai and Bangalore were concerned that if they agreed to donate their organs, the hospital staff might not work as hard to save their lives.

In most cities, 45-70% of the people said that the decision to become an organ donor would be their independent decision. This proportion was highest in Bangalore (89%) and lowest in Chennai (31%), where almost 60% said the decision would involve the family too.
Basic awareness about organ donation was high, yet most people believed organs can be donated only after death. Without addressing gaps in public awareness about organ donation and putting in place the required infrastructure such as a national registry , the queue of patients desperately waiting for organs to get a fresh lease of life could get longer.