“I weigh just a little under two hundred pounds, have brown hair, blue eyes, and a full set of teeth… Both of my kidneys function properly, and my heart runs at a steady pace of eighty-seven beats per minute... I figure I'm worth around $2,50,000,” says Scott Carney in his book ‘The Red Market — On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers.' In a collection of hard-hitting essays, Scott Carney, anthropologist and investigative journalist, explores the ugly facets of the multi-billion-dollar organ trade, which ferments underground. The author spent half a decade writing articles on the shady aspects of the trade, before actually launching this book.

DOCTORED TRUTH

Well-established global laws of demand and supply ensure that organs are always moved up the economic chain — from poor people to rich people. While most countries have banned the trade of body parts, the underground market for them is booming, says Carney. He calls it the Red Market, where the body is a sum that can be broken into various parts and monetised; where the doctors and brokers, who move the body parts, make much more than any donor. The ‘ privacy ethic' is invoked to brush under the carpet any suspicion of exploitation that may have taken place.

Carney presents enough evidence to show that exploitation is rampant in the sourcing of body parts. Take the case of Tsunami Nagar in Tamil Nadu. Most women in the desperately poor refugee camp bear the scars of a kidney ‘donation'. Similarly, slums in Egypt, South Africa, Brazil and Philippines have also been converted into veritable organ farms.

THE BONE COLLECTORS

Then there are bone factories in West Bengal, where graveyards are robbed to supply shiny, polished skeletons to medical schools. Mounds of bones and skulls lie under the open sky to dry and are later exported to colleges, miles across the globe. The stories that Carney narrates in this book are horrific and unsettling, because they are real. In Gorakhpur, 17 men were locked up in a tin shed on a dairy farm, some for more than two years. Twice every week, blood was extracted from them and sold to hospitals across the town in Uttar Pradesh. When the local police rescued the victims from the tin shed, they were so weak and delirious that they could hardly move.

CHILDREN FOR SALE

Carney tracked a child kidnapped from the streets of South India to a family in mid-western US, who ‘adopted' him without knowing that he came through illegitimate means. In an age where one can go shopping online for a child, an organ or a womb, bodies have been reduced to commodities, with limitless market values. Carney stresses on the fact that there is no thin line between ‘adopting' and ‘buying' a child in this context.

Carney has tried to cover sufficient ground in the book by touching upon the history and regulatory framework of the global flesh and blood trade. In this unique collection of essays, Carney questions the ethics behind organ transfers that take place under the garb of altruism. He raises pertinent questions regarding transparency and accountability of the supply chain, that go unquestioned. He prompts the readers to ponder on the issues at stake for humanity as a whole.

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