Farmer hounded by loan sharks to sell kidney

A Facebook community and a WhatsApp group set Roshan Kule on the road from Chandrapur to Cambodia, via Kolkata. PARI investigates. The Minthur series: Part II – Organ Trafficking

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Jaideep Hardikar

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Harshita Kalyan

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Binaifer BharuchaSee all credits

On his modest smartphone, Roshan Sadashiv Kule opens his Facebook account and scrolls through old notifications before stopping at one that changed his life. He is recounting to PARI the second phase of his ordeal.

Seated around him at his home in Minthur village are members of his family, listless and visibly tired, listening quietly and yet to overcome the shock.

One morning in October 2023, Roshan goes on, three of the lenders arrived by car at 5 a.m. The family was asleep when they knocked at the door, sticks in their hands. Using the choicest expletives, they allegedly told Roshan he owed them a lot of money and demanded he pay up.

They came again and again. He still owed them Rs. 16 lakh, they said.

But Roshan had run out of avenues he could borrow from, and all the family’s resources had been pawned or sold. His attempts to find a job had failed.

“Sell the kidney to repay my loan,” Roshan recalls one of the six accused moneylenders telling him during one meeting. “Otherwise, I will come for your family.”

The moneylender told him about a Facebook group of kidney donors and asked him to join.

“I was initially reluctant [to sell my kidney],” he says. “But when they started coming home frequently for vasuli [recovery] with weapons and sticks, we were all frightened. I started considering the option.”

One day in November 2023, he tapped the ‘join’ button (of the Kidney Donor Community group on Facebook). Within a day, Roshan received a message asking him to join a WhatsApp group. “I was sceptical, also fearful, but I went along,” he tells PARI.

The Facebook group has since been taken down.

Jaideep Hardikar

Roshan Kule stands in the shadow of his turbulent past few years, reflecting on his journey

*****

The administrator of the WhatsApp group sent him a barrage of messages over days explaining how donating a kidney was a yeoman’s service, a life-giving sacrifice. Someone struggling with renal failure would get a fresh lease of life. The procedure was safe, he was told.

“I now realise this unnamed person was my handler,” Roshan says.

The handler, as the probe by Chandrapur police later found, was Himanshu Bharadwaj, now an accused in the case and in judicial custody. His job was to cajole Roshan into agreeing to sell his kidney.

The exchanges that followed show the handler repeatedly pleaded, persuaded and bargained with Roshan over the money he would eventually receive. The offer was Rs. 8 lakh. The money would be transferred into Roshan’s wife Rohini’s account immediately post-surgery. Roshan eventually received about Rs. 7.5 lakh after the surgery in late October 2024.

All along, Roshan hid his plans from his family. He knew they would not agree.

“We had no inkling that Roshan had decided to sell his kidney,” Rohini rues. “I would never have allowed him to do it.” His father understands the pressure Roshan was under, but remains equally baffled by the decision.

Inside the WhatsApp group was another figure — an elite-sounding man introduced as Dr. Krishna. “He would explain medico-legal aspects in a convincing tone,” Roshan recalls. “He would call it a life-giving sacrifice that was very safe.” The conversations were always through WhatsApp messages and long persuasive chats, never over a voice call.

Dr Krishna was the nom de guerre of Ramkrishna Sunchu, the 36-year-old kingpin, who would show himself over video calls almost a year later when Roshan was on his way to Kolkata en route to Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where the extraction surgery would be performed.

After eight months of back and forth, and with pressure mounting from his lenders, Roshan finally agreed to sell his kidney in June 2024.

Jaideep Hardikar

Roshan with his wife Rohini and daughter Prisha

The handler and local moneylenders immediately helped him get a passport from Nagpur. Blood tests were done at Bramhapuri. Four months on, the journey took off.

His family and the villagers were completely in the dark. Roshan told them that he was trying to find a job abroad as a computer operator. After graduation, he had completed a course in computer programming.

Roshan received the tickets on his phone. First, a three-hour journey by bus from Bramhapuri to Nagpur. Then, after sharing his live location and photographs proving that he had reached Nagpur railway station, he received a train ticket to Kolkata, where Bharadwaj met him and took him to a rundown hotel.

“I was not alone; there were 12 of us huddled in a room in Kolkata where they would run blood and other tests on us in a small pathology lab,” he recalls. It seemed to Roshan that the lab was also a part of the network.

Sunchu would hold online briefings with the donor cohort and explain the dos and don’ts almost every day, as they awaited clearance from the forward handlers.

“Bharadwaj kept a close eye on us, and would not allow us out of our room.”

Their phones were taken away, to be handed back very briefly once in a while to make a call home. They were warned not to divulge any information on those calls. It was almost an illegal confinement, Roshan says.

There was a clinical finesse to the operation, he recalls.

One of the 12 men managed to flee Kolkata airport before boarding the flight to Phnom Penh, on the pretext of going to the washroom. “Tyachi fatli [He was frightened as hell],” Roshan says with a smile.

The others stayed put; desperate for money.

“All of us became close friends during that period of one month in October 2024,” Roshan says. “We hung on to hope.”

Swadesha Sharma

A wide network handlers, agents, doctors, hotel owners and taxi drivers facilitated Roshan’s journey from Minthur to Cambodia

They were in Kolkata for about 10 days, and in Cambodia for about 20, where the men were taken to the Preah Ket Mealea Hospital, registered as a military facility within the government of Cambodia and a well-known medical centre. They spent about a week before their surgeries, and nearly a fortnight in post-operative time when Roshan recounts being in pain and fear. For those two weeks he could not contact his family.

“We were confined in small rooms with no exposure to the external world,” Roshan says. “Once our stitches dried, we were dispatched back home by flight through different routes one by one,” he adds. He came via Vishakhapatnam.

The police investigation trail ends at the national border.

*****

With Roshan’s help, police traced nearly a dozen donors from different parts of India who allegedly gave up their kidneys for a consideration through the same network.

One had lost money to gambling. Another had been ruined by stock market speculation.

PARI spoke to four of them on the condition that they not be identified, since almost all of them haven’t disclosed their decision to their family members.

“I had debts, and my small business was in tatters,” one of them told PARI over the phone. The man has since taken up a job in Kerala, away from his hometown Allahabad.

In late March 2026, Chandrapur police filed a chargesheet before a sessions court. The chargesheet, which runs into a few hundred pages, is accompanied by 6,000 pages of documentary evidence. The call detail records and WhatsApp conversations between the principal accused Sunchu, alias Dr. Krishna, and a consulting transplant surgeon named in the case are part of the evidence and run into several hundred pages.

The evidence, which also includes travel documents and financial transactions, points to a well-established network.

According to the chargesheet, Sunchu – a man in his mid-40s arrested from his palatial home in Solapur town early January 2026 – had himself sold one of his kidneys and later mastered that experience into launching a well-oiled business.

Assisted by doctors, agents, intermediaries, hotel owners and taxi operators, he targeted people in financial distress through his social media handles, investigators allege. The network connected vulnerable donors with recipients in India and Cambodia, arranging medical tests, travel, and transplant procedures through a chain of hospitals and brokers, the police add.

Recipients were charged Rs. 50-70 lakh for a transplant; in some instances, the costs ran into crores depending upon the “recipient party’s financial background”. Of this amount, donors usually received Rs. 5–8 lakh, surgeons around Rs. 10-15 lakh, hospitals another Rs. 10-15 lakh, and after covering the other expenses and middlemen’s fees, Sunchu took home a substantial sum.

Investigators found that the network had facilitated between 30 and 35 illegal kidney transplants in Cambodia as well as at Star KIMS Hospital in Trichy, Tamil Nadu, and Asha Hospital in Bengaluru. Star KIMS Hospital has now been shut down.

Jaideep Hardikar

Roshan, surrounded by his family at home, recounts his five-year ordeal

Jaideep Hardikar

Roshan’s statement to the police. The FIR was filed in November 2025

With Roshan’s help, the police also traced another donor who was not operated upon in Cambodia because of issues in his blood reports. Six months later, the chargesheet says, his kidney was extracted by Dr Ravinder Pal Singh, an organ transplant surgeon from New Delhi, at Star KIMS Hospital. “I actually got only Rs. 5.5 lakh instead of the Rs. 8 lakh promised by Dr. Krishna,” he told the police. He too believed Sunchu was a qualified doctor.

The chargesheet names Dr. Ravinder Pal Singh and Dr. Rajaratnam Govindaswamy, the promoter of Star KIMS, as the two doctors involved in the organ trafficking racket.

Dr. Govindaswamy and Subhajit Pal, a middleman who assisted Sunchu in arranging the medical tests and hospital procedures, are absconding.

The police investigation today focuses on the arrest of two absconding accused named in the chargesheet, and piecing together the role of Dr Ravinder Pal Singh.

Dr Singh evaded arrest for nearly six months but surrendered before the Chandrapur police on June 24, after the Nagpur Bench of Bombay High Court rejected his anticipatory bail application and subsequently also dismissed his plea to quash the FIR against him as “non maintainable.” The Supreme Court declined to interfere with these High Court orders in May 2026, directing Dr Singh to pursue regular bail.

Opposing the anticipatory bail application in the high court in April, Government Pleader Devendra Chauhan cited and placed before the bench WhatsApp conversations recovered from Sunchu’s devices – now part of the public record. The evidence, presented in court during the hearings and accessed by PARI, reveals disturbing details.

In one exchange, Sunchu allegedly tells Dr Singh that a poor kidney donor trafficked from a village near Dhaka in Bangladesh died after his extraction surgery in Bengaluru and that he had to go to the village and pay a compensation of Rs. 1 crore to the donor’s young wife to prevent a police complaint. The WhatsApp conversations, labelled as evidence numbers 3393 and 3415, allegedly discuss how the donor was quietly cremated in Bengaluru. Sunchu, one WhatsApp conversation which is part of the evidence reveals, told the doctor that the entire team needed to share the financial costs arising from the incident.

The conversations detail financial transactions routed through informal channels. The police told the court during hearings on Singh’s anticipatory bail petition that all financial transactions were through the hawala system.

Jaideep Hardikar

A news report on the rejection of Dr Ravinder Pal Singh’s anticipatory bail petition

Jaideep Hardikar

Another report on the case in another Marathi newspaper

The chargesheet invokes provisions relating to criminal conspiracy, human trafficking, illegal organ trade and commercial dealings in human organs under the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act (THOTA), besides offences linked to intimidation, extortion, wrongful confinement and illegal moneylending.

While refusing anticipatory bail, the Bombay High Court’s Nagpur Bench observed that the accused doctor, who seems to be working as a consulting surgeon with a number of hospitals across India, was aware of the legal framework governing organ donation. The allegations, the court emphasised, involve serious violations of statutory safeguards, coercion and dubious financial transactions.

*****

The case points to systemic failure on a gigantic scale.

Rural indebtedness and unregulated private moneylending; financial illiteracy and weak local enforcement; medical malpractice and transnational trafficking networks – Roshan’s story intersects with almost every layer of exploitation.

Decisions to sell organs rarely emerge in isolation. They are shaped by pressure, debt, and the narrowing of choices until one option appears to be the only remaining path. In many cases, sellers believe they are stepping out of poverty. In most, they remain within it.

Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, founder of the Organs Watch project at the University of California, Berkeley, has written extensively about how global organ markets exploit the desperation of both buyers and sellers, with organs typically flowing “from the poor to the affluent.”

The annual scale of black market transplant operations involving purchased human organs across the world is 10,000, the World Health Organization estimated more than a decade ago.

“Patients, many of whom will go to China, India or Pakistan for surgery, can pay up to $200,000 (nearly £128,000, or about Rs. 2 crore) for a kidney to gangs who harvest organs from vulnerable, desperate people, sometimes for as little as $5,000,” the WHO had found.

Demand for kidneys, driven by rising diabetes and other metabolic disorders, continues to outstrip supply.

Scholar Saradamoyee Chatterjee, in a study of emerging economies, writes: “The recent rise in malfunctioning metabolic conditions has significantly increased the demand for organs for transplantation throughout the world, against an inadequate supply. This has paved the way for a lucrative global black market for purchased organs.”

Reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime describe trafficking for organ removal as a transnational crime because recruitment, transportation, surgery and financial transactions often occur across different jurisdictions.

Bangladesh remains a significant source of donors in several documented investigations. Cambodia, meanwhile, has acquired notoriety for its overlap of organ trafficking, cyber-scam compounds, labour trafficking and modern forms of bondage.

Jaideep Hardikar

An anguished Sadashiv Kule talks about how a loan of Rs. 1 lakh plunged his happy family into an ocean of sorrows

Jaideep Hardikar

Roshan in the sprawling cattle shed that he had built with a bank loan, but which is now empty

Roshan’s journey follows that pattern almost exactly.

The decision did not arrive in a single moment. It was assembled over weeks and months – through conversations, calculations and the steady erosion of alternatives. By the time the possibility of selling a kidney was spoken aloud, it no longer sounded extraordinary.

Today, Roshan is left with a vertical scar on the left side of his abdomen and a list of lifelong dos and don’ts. He must live with the fact that he has no margin of error on the health front.

The money vanished quickly. The land did not return. The debt did not disappear. What remained was the knowledge that the choice he believed would rescue his family had instead drawn him into a much larger system.

But the journey that began in a village debt trap and passed through Kolkata and Cambodia was not yet over. Beyond the hospitals and operating theatres lay another shadow economy – the cyberscam compounds of Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and the trafficking routes to it – with an offer too good to be true.

Read The Minthur Series: Part I – A farm loan attracts organ traffickers

Read The Minthur Series: Part III – Kidney sold; farmer walks into Laos job trap

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Author

Jaideep Hardikar

Jaideep Hardikar is a senior journalist and PARI Roving Reporter, based in Nagpur. He is author of Ramrao: The story of India’s farm crisis. In 2025, Jaideep won the inaugural Award of Excellence in Journalism at the Ramoji Excellence Awards 2025 in recognition of “his outstanding contribution to meaningful, responsible, and impactful journalism,” and whose work inspires “social awareness, compassion and change.”

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Editor

Harshita Kalyan

Harshita Kalyan is a senior editor with an interest in politics and people. She is based in Kolkata.

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Photo Editor

Binaifer Bharucha

Binaifer Bharucha is a freelance photographer based in Mumbai, and Photo Editor at the People’s Archive of Rural India.

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Farmer hounded by loan sharks to sell kidney