MOHAN Foundation

Did You Know?

• Green is a color symbolizing organ donation, and MOHAN Foundation bathed important monuments in India green in 2018.
• The foundation runs a 24-hour toll-free organ donation helpline in eight languages, supported by SBI Foundation.

Promoting organ donation

The Transplantation of Human Organ Act, passed by the Indian parliament in 1994, accepted brain death for organ donation and made organ commerce a punishable offense, enabling deceased donation with family consent. India follows an informed consent model. The foundation works to shift public and medical professional attitudes through awareness talks, rallies, college and office programmes, sensitization of police and hospital staff, and honoring donor families. It distributed donor cards and brochures, organized an Organ Donation Rally at Marina Beach, Chennai, and created a first-of-its-kind sand sculpture on organ donation there. The foundation's efforts helped Rajasthan perform its first deceased donor and set up the Rajasthan Network for Organ Sharing Registry, with similar registries for Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In 2018, it created an art installation called 'Life before Ashes' using human ashes to promote organ donation.

Associated celebrities

Celebrities including actors, cricket players, religious leaders, and politicians have been used to popularize organ donation. In India, Priyanka Chopra, Anil Kumble, Revathi Menon, Madhavan, Suniel Shetty, Sivakumar, Kiran Rao, Raveena Tandon, Navjot Singh Sidhu, Gautam Gambhir, Farah Khan, Nandita Das, Aamir Khan, and Anand Gandhi have promoted and pledged their organs. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan promoted eye donation. Sheila Dikshit, then Chief Minister of Delhi, became the first chief minister in India to pledge her organs in April 2012. Kapil Dev pledged support in 2014, and Amitabh Bachchan pledged on 7 October 2020.

Organ donor card

MOHAN Foundation uses donor cards, which indicate a person's wish to donate organs after death, to raise awareness and collect pledges. Over ten years, it has distributed more than one million such cards in English and five Indian languages. In March 2012, the foundation ran a major campaign called DAAN with partners including HCL Technologies, Apollo Group of Hospitals, Chennai Police, the Indian Medical Association, and the Tamil Nadu government's Cadaver Transplant Programme. This drive secured over 12,900 pledges from police, doctors, and corporate staff, making it the country's largest organ donation campaign at the time. That record was later broken by the Times of India in July and August 2013, which worked with four NGOs, including MOHAN Foundation, and obtained more than 50,000 pledges.

Training Transplant Coordinators

A transplant coordinator is a medical professional who coordinates organ donation activities, including counseling families of brain dead individuals. The foundation offers training courses of one week, one month, six months, and one year. The one-year Post Graduate Diploma in Transplant Coordination and Grief Counselling is a blended learning course for working healthcare professionals. These programmes have been partly funded by Sir Ratan Tata Trust & Navajbai Ratan Tata Trust. Coordinators are trained in medical, legal, and ethical aspects, as well as soft skills for grief counseling. The organ donation rate in India increased from 0.08 per million population in 2008 to 0.8 per million population in 2017, a ten-fold rise, with trained coordinators cited as a contributing factor. The foundation partners with The Transplantation Society, Indian Society of Nephrology, Indian Society of Organ Transplantation, World Health Organization, and Transplant Procurement Management of Spain for national workshops. One-week training programmes are held with other NGOs like Shatayu and government organizations in cities including Ahmedabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Bangalore.