Kidney racket: Chennai doc made 100 crore !! - Video

Dr Palani Ravichandran, the kingpin of the kidney racket busted by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch this week,

Dr Palani Ravichandran

made a mind-boggling Rs 100 crore from illegal kidney transplants in six years. Police say he has confessed to more than 600 transplants, and charging anything between Rs 15-25 lakh for each operation.

"Ravichandran has confessed to having done more than 600 such transplants. He had been running the racket since 2001. We have also seized documents related to renal operations from the two hospitals where Ravichandran operated, and they support his confession," the investigating officer of the case, API Dinesh Kadam said.

On Thursday, the Income Tax department conducted raids at Ravichandran's residence and seized incriminating documents, related to his illegal money transactions. The Mumbai police Crime Branch too has seized several documents related to kidney transplants from the two Chennai hospitals — St Thomas Hospital and Bharatiraja Hospital — from where Ravichandran ran his racket.

“We still have a team stationed in Chennai, collecting evidence and looking for others involved in the racket,” said Kadam.



The Crime Branch on Tuesday busted a mega kidney racket being run from Chennai in which the alleged racketeers, including Ravichandran, duped poor people into selling their kidneys to rich Indians and foreigners, and kept for themselves the major share of the earnings.

The police now believe the racket is much bigger than they earlier envisaged, and there could be several people,

One of the victims of the racket shows the scar left from the kidney operation

including some of Chennai's high-and-mighty, involved in it. “A racket running into over Rs 100 crore has to have its tentacles spread far and wide. It couldn't have been operated by a motley group of people for so many years without being detected,” said an officer with the Crime Branch.

Four years back, a Chennai daily carried a report about a man losing his kidney to the racket. Ravichandran’s name then cropped up as the doctor who had operated on the victim. However, no action was taken by the police. The victim too did not lodge a complaint.


The story so far
On Tuesday, Unit 3 of the Crime Branch busted a mega organ transplant racket being run from two hospitals in Chennai, and arrested five people including two agents and a doctor in the case. The racket was being run by Dr Palani Ravichandran, and the agents were identified as Brijendra Hiralal Bisen alias Sandeep, 34, and Mohammed Hanif Musabhai Mansoori, 45. The trio lured poor people from across the country into selling their kidneys to rich patients by promising them lakhs of rupees. The donors were promised Rs 2-3 lakh, but once the transplant was done, they were conned into accepting only Rs 25-60,000 while the alleged kingpin pocketed Rs 8-9 lakh. The gang had sourced at least 100 kidneys from Mumbai alone before they fell into the police net.

The donors were from Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and even neighbouring Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal. They were lured by agents who worked for the kingpin for a commission. The recipients were Indians, and people from Gulf countries and some South-east Asian countries.