Lucy’s Bye-Fellow and Land Economy DoS, Dr Chatterjee, publishes in the ‘Handbook of BRICS and Emerging Economies’
On the 17 December 2020, Dr Saradamoyee Chatterjee’s chapter entitled, ‘The illegal trade in organs and poverty in India: A comparative analysis with Brazil and China’ was published in the ‘Handbook of BRICS and Emerging Economies’, edited by PB Anand, Shailaja Fennel, and Flavio Comim. Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publisher of this book, and as the title suggests, it is dedicated to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and emerging economies. The chapter is based upon her earlier research on the illegal trade in human organs (primarily kidneys), with a focus on India. Her first published work on this subject was in 2017, when she published an article entitled, ‘The illegal trade in organs: who benefits?' in the European Review of Organised Crime (4:2; pp4-26). The article discussed the factors responsible for the emergence and the sustained existence of the illegal trade in kidneys in India.
In this recent OUP chapter, she analyses poverty as a causal link to India’s illegal trade in kidneys and compared this with Brazil and China. The trade initially emerged to meet the scarcity of organs for transplantation, but gradually took the shape of a profit-oriented black market economy, thriving on the exploitation of the poor. Dr Chatterjee discusses how the commodification of body or body parts such as kidneys is an expression of the endemic poverty, social inequality, and marginalisation of a certain section of the population in economically less prosperous countries such as Brazil, India, and China. It is typically a result of the limited choices available to the poor to lift themselves from severe financial crisis, or in some instances they feel powerless to protect themselves from this commodification.
Dr Chatterjee is currently working further on the gender dimension of this illegal trade; due to the pandemic and the associated challenges thereof, it seems like a colossal task!
About Dr Chatterjee
Saradamoyee is a Bye- Fellow and Director of Studies in Land Economy at Lucy Cavendish College. She is also an Affiliated Lecturer at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge. At the Centre, she coordinates a paper for the MPhil students, which discusses key issues linking migration, forced migration, and human trafficking from a developmental perspective. Before this, she was a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD from the University of Delhi, India. Her research interests include human and organ trafficking, gender, capabilities, and disability.
