An egg-supply hub hatches an inhuman scam

Maharashtra’s Thane-Badlapur belt bred militant trade unionism in the 1970s. That ghost was laid, and replaced by laying hens. Badlapur’s eggs became a brand. Now it’s been branded with shame – for incubating human eggs. Last week, cops reportedly arrested four hen-honchos of this ‘operation’. Apparently, at least 40 poor women had been persuaded to sell their ‘ova’ for Rs 25,000-Rs 30,000 per procedure. 

Surro gate-keeping is clearly not what it’s cracked up to be. While Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act allows a woman to donate her eggs only once in her lifetime, emphasis on ‘donate’, these had had theirs eggstracted up to 33 times. This would have battered more than just their own reproductive system – not unlike the cruelties inflicted on battery hens in commercial poultry farming. 

The latter operation is ‘sunnyside up’, the birds being exposed to artificial daylight to fool them into laying. But the poor human equivalents remained in the dark over the varied ill-effects of such excessive ‘harvesting’. Similarly, just as hens are pumped with chemicals to boost production, the eggsploited women were injected with ovulation-stimulating drugs, and then underwent unprofessionally guided sonography. 

Like folks keeping a couple of hens for breakfast omelets, this too was a home industry: the hard-boiled queen-pin, Sulakshana Gadekar, carried out the above procedures in her unsanitised house, sans medical supervision. Unable to deliver the coop de grace, she sent her ‘suppliers’ to IVF/ART centres, where  complicit doctors removed the eggs in proper OTs. Maybe these centres too were yolked to the scam. It got fried when a woman came to a primary health centre complaining that she hadn’t been paid.   

The customers would be well-off wannabe moms with unsatisfactory ovulation. But their ‘ova-the-counter’ eggstasy was rooted in supply-side agony. 

Eggs produced by free-range hens are pricier; in this racket, ‘range’ was in degree of vulnerability/gullibility. Of course, nothing was ‘free’. Not only did the service not come cheap-cheap, the customer shelled out a far-from poultry sum.                          

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Alec Smart said: ‘‘ ‘Lord saheb’ for colonial masters was corrupted to ‘Laat saheb’. Today they’re really being kicked out.”

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