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Authors: Scott Carney
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excellent.”
Another Osta customer is a firm called Dentsply Rinn, which offers a plastic model head containing a real skull, used for training dentists. “It’s very difficult to procure human bones,” marketing manager Kimberly Brown says. “Our requirements stipulate that the skulls must be of a certain size and grade and without certain anatomical defects. But we have no requirement for their origin.” The skull is a bestseller in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Indian authorities express a similar lack of concern. Although the international bone trade violates the national export law and local statutes against grave desecration, officials look the other way. “This is not a new thing,” says Rajeev Kumar, West Bengal’s deputy inspector general of police. “There’s no evidence that they were killing people.” The police took an interest in Biswas only because the bodies of a few important people went missing. “We are trying to implement the law based on the stress society places on it,” he adds. “Society does not see this as a very serious thing.”
The need to study human bones in medicine is well established. The need to obtain the informed consent of people whose bones are studied is not. The reemergence of India’s bone trade reflects the tension between these requirements. While the supply of human skeletons targets the recently dead, the even more dangerous practice of collecting living kidneys from slum dwellers is merely a modern incarnation of an ancient Indian practice.
Meanwhile, the bone factories of Kolkata are back in business.
The outside of Young Brothers, an anatomical supply company in Kolkata, India. Witnesses said that this run-down office building was a center of the Indian red market in human bones after the 1985 ban. The workers here used to dry human bones on the roof and clean the corpses of their flesh inside. The office is still active, but it is difficult to know what happens behind its closed doors.
Chapter Three
Kidney Prospecting
Kala Arumugam shows a long scar along her abdomen where surgeons extracted her kidney. Although the surgery took place several months before this photo was taken, she still has trouble working. She earned $1,000 for selling her organ.
T HE DAY AFTER Christmas 2004, an earthquake occurred off the coast of Banda Ache, Indonesia, sending shockwaves racing across the ocean floor and culminating in a massive burst of energy that smashed into the shores of India and Sri Lanka. The tsunami claimed more than two hundred thousand lives and left a cataclysmic wake of families torn apart and a seemingly endless stream of refugees. While NGOs and governments poured aid into the area to rebuild the lives of victims, a few entrepreneurial hospitals and organ brokers saw the tragedy as an opportunity to make a fortune peddling the kidneys of refugees.
In Tsunami Nagar, a desperately poor refugee camp for tsunami survivors in India’s Tamil Nadu province, Maria Selvam is the most respected man. For two years this former fisherman has spent most of his days arguing with government bureaucrats for basic resources that had been promised to them by the international community. All he wants is for the people in the three settlements that he presides over to once again be able to make their livings from the sea. When I meet him almost two years after the tsunami, the camp is little more than a holding area with hopeless concrete rows of dismal houses. Raw sewage runs in the gutters by people’s homes, and employment prospects are as scarce as the resident children’s access to education.
As the village’s only elected official, Selvam is the closest thing the refugees have to a celebrity. His photograph is plastered on the sides of buildings and above the wide iron gate that is the camp’s official entrance. But his popularity has begun to wane. Local youths have thrown rocks through his posters and carved away the
Another Osta customer is a firm called Dentsply Rinn, which offers a plastic model head containing a real skull, used for training dentists. “It’s very difficult to procure human bones,” marketing manager Kimberly Brown says. “Our requirements stipulate that the skulls must be of a certain size and grade and without certain anatomical defects. But we have no requirement for their origin.” The skull is a bestseller in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Indian authorities express a similar lack of concern. Although the international bone trade violates the national export law and local statutes against grave desecration, officials look the other way. “This is not a new thing,” says Rajeev Kumar, West Bengal’s deputy inspector general of police. “There’s no evidence that they were killing people.” The police took an interest in Biswas only because the bodies of a few important people went missing. “We are trying to implement the law based on the stress society places on it,” he adds. “Society does not see this as a very serious thing.”
The need to study human bones in medicine is well established. The need to obtain the informed consent of people whose bones are studied is not. The reemergence of India’s bone trade reflects the tension between these requirements. While the supply of human skeletons targets the recently dead, the even more dangerous practice of collecting living kidneys from slum dwellers is merely a modern incarnation of an ancient Indian practice.
Meanwhile, the bone factories of Kolkata are back in business.
The outside of Young Brothers, an anatomical supply company in Kolkata, India. Witnesses said that this run-down office building was a center of the Indian red market in human bones after the 1985 ban. The workers here used to dry human bones on the roof and clean the corpses of their flesh inside. The office is still active, but it is difficult to know what happens behind its closed doors.
Chapter Three
Kidney Prospecting
Kala Arumugam shows a long scar along her abdomen where surgeons extracted her kidney. Although the surgery took place several months before this photo was taken, she still has trouble working. She earned $1,000 for selling her organ.
T HE DAY AFTER Christmas 2004, an earthquake occurred off the coast of Banda Ache, Indonesia, sending shockwaves racing across the ocean floor and culminating in a massive burst of energy that smashed into the shores of India and Sri Lanka. The tsunami claimed more than two hundred thousand lives and left a cataclysmic wake of families torn apart and a seemingly endless stream of refugees. While NGOs and governments poured aid into the area to rebuild the lives of victims, a few entrepreneurial hospitals and organ brokers saw the tragedy as an opportunity to make a fortune peddling the kidneys of refugees.
In Tsunami Nagar, a desperately poor refugee camp for tsunami survivors in India’s Tamil Nadu province, Maria Selvam is the most respected man. For two years this former fisherman has spent most of his days arguing with government bureaucrats for basic resources that had been promised to them by the international community. All he wants is for the people in the three settlements that he presides over to once again be able to make their livings from the sea. When I meet him almost two years after the tsunami, the camp is little more than a holding area with hopeless concrete rows of dismal houses. Raw sewage runs in the gutters by people’s homes, and employment prospects are as scarce as the resident children’s access to education.
As the village’s only elected official, Selvam is the closest thing the refugees have to a celebrity. His photograph is plastered on the sides of buildings and above the wide iron gate that is the camp’s official entrance. But his popularity has begun to wane. Local youths have thrown rocks through his posters and carved away the
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