Context: National Organ Donation Day was celebrated on 27th November by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

• National Organ Transplant Programme (NOTP): It Provides financial grants for establishing ROTTOs, SOTTOs, developing new and upgrading existing retrieval and transplant centres.
• Organ Donation Institutional Set up: The National Organ & Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), the Regional Organ & Tissue Transplant Organisations (ROTTO) at regional level and the State Organ & Tissue Transplant Organisations (SOTTO) at state level.
• State of Organ Donation in India: India ranked third in the world as per WHO Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation (GODT) in terms of organ donation.

Key Points

• To raise awareness of organ donation, the Indian government observes this Day every year.
• Organ donations have always been abysmally low in India. According to estimates, only 0.65 donations per million population take place in the country, compared to 35 in Spain and 26 in the US.
• The pandemic and the lockdown adversely affected organ donations in India.
• However, even before the pandemic, organ donations have always been low in India.
• According to data released by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in 2019, 1.5-2 lakh people require kidney transplants annually but only about 8,000 (4 per cent) patients receive them.
• Similarly, almost 80,000 patients require liver transplants every year but only 1,800 of these transplants are performed. About 1 lakh patients require corneal or eye transplants annually but less than half manage to get them.
• Even for cardiac patients, of the 10,000 who require heart transplants, only about 200 of them match with viable donors.

Challenges

• A major reason for this shortage is the lack of awareness among people about the process of donation.
• Several myths associated with organ donations also hamper the process in India, along with fears of disfigurement, non-acceptance of brain death, religious beliefs and migrant workers not having relatives on-site to give consent.
• Those who wish to become organ donors need to register themselves on online portals like the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO), Regional Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (ROTTO) or the Organ Retrieval Banking Organisation (ORBO).
• Family members of a deceased person can also consent to donate their organs.
• As per a 2019 report, only 3% of the population across 12 cities in the country have registered to donate organs.