Dear All

Hope you all are fine. I am writing to inform a not a nice news, but the
fact in the tsunami temporary shelters. As you know from the November
2006, we are implementing a project for the Prevention of STD, HIV/AIDS
and trafficking of women in the temporary shelters, funded by the United
Nations Development Programme, we could go more into the lifestye of the
people in the temporary shelters. This gave us more shocking revelations
that women have resorted to selling their Kidneys for money and we have
also identified that some women were also lured into prostitution in the
temporary shelters. After this identification we started to talk to the
women in the temporary shelters to identified how many of them have sold
their kidneys and to create awareness about the risks and issues. This
intervention created awareness among the people that some of the community
members spoke to the press about the sale of kidneys and was reported in
the news papers. Now this has taken a serious turn, government of Tamil
Nadu has ordered an enquiry and the brokers who took the women are being
searched and the hospitals that did the surgery are questioned.

It is found that women were targeted for the kidney sale. In the temporary
shelters more than 30 have been identified to have sold their kidneys but
about 12 before tsunami and the rest after tsunami. Only two were men and
the rest 28 were women. It seems that the women were promised that if they
sell their Kidneys they will get a sum of Rs.1,50,000/- but in reality
they were cheated and were given only about 30,000 to 50,000 rupees. NO
proper follow up treatment was given to them except in few cases.

Though we cannot fully attribute this to poverty, as more efforts have
been done to help the women self help groups to start up alternate
livelihood and the government has recently started the ADB project to
support for the livelihood of people, the brokers have been successful in
alluring the people to sell their kidneys for money.

Now this issue is a very hot news in the whole of India, and particularly
in Chennai. This means more work, and to handle many press and media about
the situation. In the mean time we are also trying to identify in other
coastal slums about the sale of Kidneys and we are getting information
that many women have already sold Kidneys and this has been a continuing
racket in Chennai for quite some years. In the year 2002, when the
government became strict on money lenders, we exposed that women resort to
sale of kidneys to pay back money lenders. But at that time no action was
taken, but this time, we feel that government will be forced to take
strict action against such preying on poor people.

This is for you kind information.

Regards
N. Paul Sunder Singh