With transplant changes afoot, Rotary members push to end global organ shortages
Anil Srivatsa drives an SUV plastered with stickers and slogans across India on a quixotic mission: to teach as many of the country’s 1.4 billion people as he can about the importance of organ donation.
He’s one man in his truck, often accompanied by his wife, driving from town to town for several weeks each year to try to increase India’s organ donation rate, because it ranks among the world’s worst. “There is a deep cultural bias against organ donation in India,” says Srivatsa, a media entrepreneur who helped found the Rotary Club of Organ Donation in 2022. “There is much work to be done in this space, to counter misinformation and fear.”
For Srivatsa, the mission is intensely personal. Ten years ago, he donated his left kidney to his brother, Arjun Srivatsa, a neurosurgeon and a member of the Rotary Club of Bangalore, who had chronic renal failure. On his driving tours, Srivatsa sleeps in a rooftop pop-up tent on his SUV. One of its decals says “Kidney donors are sexy!” He speaks to a Rotary club if there is one in town — there are more than 4,000 in the country — or he assembles what residents he can when there’s not.
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Its time to consider organ donation | Rotary International
