Crackers and drumbeats greeted paddler A. Amalraj as he went back home in a chariot. Photo: B. Jothi Ramalingam / The Hindu
Wide-eyed young table-tennis enthusiasts, learning at the academy run by Amalraj’s family, walked with him
At Pulianthope, on Saturday, the celebration was a flashy affair as people belonging to all communities came together to welcome the hero of their neighbourhood.
The sound of crackers and drumbeats filled the air as Commonwealth Games silver medal-winning paddler A. Amalraj went back home in a chariot.
Despite the fatigue after a long flight, Amalraj didn’t show any hints of discomfort even when his chariot was interrupted every ten metres or so by people, including the elderly, and often stopped to shake hands and receive a shawl or a soft drink.
Speaking to The Hindu, Amalraj said he hoped this success would make the sport popular, particularly in his neighbourhood. “Of course, my next goal is to qualify for the Olympic Games, which I narrowly missed in 2012. Achievements like these have the potential to get many more youngsters interested in the games.”
It was a poignant moment when he garlanded the statue of B.R. Ambedkar, especially after some well-wishers reiterated how Amalraj is an inspiration for the SC/ST community that had been denied opportunities systematically.
Several wide-eyed young table-tennis enthusiasts, learning the ropes at the Amala Annai Table Tennis Academy, which is incidentally run by Amalraj’s family, walked the entire stretch with him.
He arrived at Pulianthope after attending a few felicitation functions, one of which was organised by the Tamil Nadu SC/ST Officers Welfare Association, en route from the airport. A well-wisher, summing up his feelings on Amalraj’s success at the international stage, said, “He is a great inspiration for the entire community. With his success, he has made the entire community proud.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Chennai / by Udhav Naig / Chennai – August 10th, 2014
The city has not one but several streets called Mahal Theru numbered 1 to 8 named after Thirumalai Nayak Mahal. All the streets from Manajanakara Theru lead to Nayak Mahal, a standing testimony to the architectural mastery of the Madurai Nayaks.
An important landmark in the city, Nayak Mahal was constructed in 1636 by Nayak King Thirumalai Nayak who ruled Madurai between 1623 and 1659. It is an architectural wonder which attracts tourists from all over the globe. In its glorious days, Nayak Mahal was four times bigger from what is remaining at present and extended up to Manajanakara Theru in the city.
According to archaeologists Mahal Streets were once part of the Nayak Mahal which was left to ruin before the British took measures to conserve the remaining structure in 1866. C Santhalingam, a retired archaeologist from city said present day Mahal streets were once upon a time the western part of the Mahal. “The palace was huge and extended up to present day Manjanakara Theru. Nayak rulers moved their seat of power to Trichy after Thirumalai Nayak and demolished the major portion of the Mahal to construct a palace there. The remaining portion fell apart over the ages. Even today many houses on Mahal streets dilapidated pillars which were once part of the Mahal,” he said. Later British used some portions of the Mahal as government offices and Lord Napier played a crucial role in renovating and conserving the present day Nayak Mahal, he said.
K Mohan, 65, a resident in New Ramnad road and student of Thiruvallurvar Mahal High Sec School near Nayak Mahal recalled his student days in these streets. “In those days, the Mahal functioned as district court and there were not many restrictions to enter inside. As children we used to play around the palace during lunch break since drinking water was available inside. Some of us used to act as guide for visiting tourists and earn some pocket money,” he said. Mahal Streets was the hub of textile industry in those days since most of the residents were of Sourastran community who are generally expert weavers. They used to dry their yarns in these long lanes and there were also many paper and printing units functioning in Mahal streets”, said Mohan. Now the streets look different as many previous residents have shifted to other parts of the city and other industries and shops have cropped up.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Madurai / TNN / July 28th, 2014
Claiming that Tamil Nadu was the safest state for women in the country, Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on Wednesday told the Assembly that sexual crimes had halved since she took charge in 2011. Listing the steps taken to ensure the safety and security of women, she maintained that the rising number of police complaints being filed by women evidenced this.
This assertion came in response to the insinuation that rapes were increasing in Tamil Nadu, made by DMDK member VC Chandhirakumar, during the debate on the Police and Fire & Rescue Services Departments.
“Since this government took charge in 2011, police personnel have been ordered to pay special attention and work expeditiously on crimes against women. This work is happening as per the 13-point plan I had formulated following the gang rape incident in Delhi,” she said.
“I can categorically state that crimes against women have reduced greatly since I took charge as Chief Minister for the third time. Not only crimes against women, all sorts of crime have reduced. I can proudly say Tamil Nadu is the safest state for women in India,” the CM added.
Jayalalithaa backed up this claim by citing statistics, showing that dowry harassment cases had come down from 165, at the end of the previous DMK regime, in 2010 to 118 in 2013. Sexual crimes had halved between 2010 and 2013, from 638 to 313, registering steep falls in every year in between.
However, she said the biggest indicator of increasing safety for women in the State was evident from the number of cases they had come forward to file. “Cases registered under the Dowry Prevention Act were 199 in 2010, 195 in 2011, 277 in 2012 and 305 in 2013. The very fact that women are feeling secure enough to come forward to file complaints is a testament to this government’s track record in ensuring action on complaints. Under the previous minority DMK government, they were not filing complaints as they knew no action would be taken,” she said, adding that it was her previous administration that had, in 1992, started All Women Police Stations in State.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Tamil Nadu / by Express News Service / August 07th, 2014
Angel investing, the catalyst, which turns an entrepreneur’s idea into reality, is catching up in Madurai, with the city getting its first angel investor, C R Venkatesh, CEO of Dotcom Infoway who recently joined Indian Angel Network (IAN), one of the biggest angel investors’ network in South Asia.
Angel investors invest money – mostly on ownership stake – on workable business ideas and help small-time entrepreneurs scale up their ventures. The Madurai region had hitherto missed the attention of the IAN and this development has raised hopes of many entrepreneurs in the city, particularly in the context of the Union budget stressing on the importance of entrepreneurship and start-ups.
“Ideas are everywhere and many times it is too late for these ideas to be realized into reality, because of lack of funds and I want to help entrepreneurs realize their dreams,” said Venkatesh, who is also the co-founder of Magzter Inc.
“There are at least five people from this region who have shown interest to take up angel investing. There were seminars on angel investing in the city recently which motivated several persons. Soon, more would get involved in it,” said Ashwin R Desai, managing director of A and T Network Systems. There are a lot of business ideas emerging from this part of the region, but only a fraction of them are turning their dreams into reality and the rest do not successfully enter into business mainly due to the absence of financial help, experts say. For instance, two students from Madurai who were among five from across India to be selected by an IT firm based on the potential of their business model could not launch their business due to lack of financial help.
Rajesh Kanna, an M Tech student of Pandian Saraswathi Yadava College of Engineering had developed a website portal called ‘Food Web’. The website was based on the fact that there is a large quantity of food going waste while there are many people going to bed hungry. This food should be used to feed the hungry, particularly children. The concept was selected but the need for funding prevented him from launching the site.
“Soon students like them from southern Tamil Nadu would be benefitted from the angel investors. We are planning to start a localized form of IAN for southern region. The investors would have to invest Rs 5 lakh in two years compared to members of Indian Angel Network, who would invest a minimum of Rs 25 lakh or more each every year,” said R Sivarajah, the founder-director of NativeLead Foundation which nurtures entrepreneurs from southern Tamil Nadu.
“Big Angel funding is usually of around Rs 30 lakh, but most of the young start-ups and ideas of students in this region require smaller amounts ranging from Rs 3 to 20 lakh to take them to the next stage. Efforts are being taken up to bring in a lot of small-scale angel investors who are connected to Madurai in some way,” P Archana, head, programmes and relationships, NativeLead Foundation said.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Madurai / TNN / August 02nd, 2014
India is emerging as a vaccine manufacturing hub, thanks to the biotechnology solutions, noted Dr Renu Swarup, advisor to the Department of Bio-technology (DBT), Government of India, who is also the managing director of Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) under the DBT.
She was delivering the Kunthala Jayaraman Endowment Lecture as part of the third edition of the Bio Summit at VIT on Thursday. She said, “Successful trials of vaccines for rotavirus, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, dengue, typhoid, malaria, leprosy, anthrax and cholera were underway in collaboration with many national and international agencies.”
She said the goal of the department was to develop 100 billion US dollar industry in biotechnology in the country by the year 2025, to fuel economic development and employment generation. “A dynamic and vibrant biotech industry is one of the main engines of innovation,” she pointed out, adding, “We have the potential and capacity, and what is needed is collaboration to move forward.”
The infrastructure support and research capacity building by the Indian Government had helped the country to be looked upon by other developed countries as a capable partner, to collaborate in the field of biotechnology. The genome initiative undertaken by India had helped in making considerable progress in the sequencing, she added. She said biotech science clusters were being developed at Faridabad, Mohali and Bangalore, to enable integrated growth of science, engineering, agriculture and medicine in a multi-disciplinary environment. Dr Shrikant Anant from the University of Kansas School of Medicine spoke about cancer stem cells. Abhaya Kumar, CEO and MD of Shasun Pharmaceuticals, Chennai, spoke on entrepreneurship, while Dr Ganesh Sambasivam spoke about his company Anthem.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Tamil Nadu / by Express News Service / August 08th, 2014
This innovator made a kit that frees women in many parts of the world of the threat of infection during childbirth.
Zubaida Bai at the production facility of ayzh, 30km from Chennai. Photo: Nathan G/Mint
Freedom from risky childbirth | Zubaida Bai
Growing up in Chennai, a young Zubaida Bai wanted to study further after completing class XII. A reasonable request, except that in her family, nobody—male or female—had made it to college. The women in her family were usually married in their teens. Plus, Zubaida’s father did not have the finances to put her through college.
Undeterred, she decided to fight fate.
At 33, Zubaida Bai was the founder-CEO of ayzh (pronounced “eyes”), a low-cost women’s healthcare company based in Chennai and Colorado, US. Her biggest achievement: JANMA, a birthing kit sold and distributed through non-governmental organizations and healthcare companies.
JANMA (birth in Hindi) kits consist of six things: an apron, a sheet, a hand sanitizer, an antiseptic soap, a cord clip and a surgical blade. They meet the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines of “six cleans” during childbirth—clean hands of the attendant, clean surface, clean blade, clean cord tie, clean towels to dry the baby and wrap it, and clean cloth to wrap the mother. A jute purse in five colours contains the kit and and it can be used as a purse after delivery.
From mundane struggles with a traditional Muslim family to being a successful innovator, Zubaida Bai’s journey has been one about exercising the right to free choice although that involved selling her jewellery to get ayzh off the ground.
Soon after school, Zubaida took a year off, selling retail banking services door-to-door for ABN Amro, cold-calling customers and earning her first pay cheque when she was 17. Soon she was in college, studying mechanical engineering, and went on to become the first graduate in her entire family. After graduation, she dreamt of designing cars, but ended up at auto-parts company Sundram Fasteners. “I was the only girl on the entire floor, all I did every day was change the dimensions on a CAD design or take printouts. I was getting fat from all the thayir saadam (curd rice),” she recalls.
She was soon planning her escape. Scouring the Internet for a master’s degree, she secretly applied to various universities. After an acceptance letter for a fully funded scholarship to an M.Tech programme at Dalarna University, Sweden, arrived, she told her parents. Her father thought this was one of those infamous scams that promised you a job and ended up hiring you as domestic labour. But finally, Zubaida left home.
In the summer of her first semester in college, she took a road trip, was part of a students’ exchange programme, visited Poland and, during a period of self-discovery, she decided to start wearing the hijab, though no one in her family did.
Back in Chennai before her second semester ended and coaxed to meet a potential suitor, Habib Anwar, she feared the worst. “(But) he said that he was looking for an educated girl, who he would like to work rather than sit at home and squabble with his relatives,” says Zubaida.
Anwar supported Zubaida’s plan to study further as well. Soon they were married. Much later, he would be instrumental in providing the necessary support to make ayzh a success.
In 2006, Zubaida gave birth to the first of her three sons, Yasin. It was a painful experience. She needed surgery, was forced to rest for two months and took close to a year to recover fully. In her childhood, she had witnessed the lack of healthcare facilities for her mother, close relatives and community, and the lack of financial resources to pay for these if they did happen to be available.
Sometime in 2009, as part of a master’s in business administration in global social and sustainable enterprises at the University of Colorado, US, Zubaida came to India to research ideas that could be developed into products. She worked with Chennai-based non-profit Rural Innovations Network (RIN), making the JS Milker, a vacuum-driven cow-milking machine, low-cost and commercially viable. In Rajasthan, she met a village dai (midwife) who had just delivered a baby with a grass-cutting sickle.
This was her a-ha moment. She started reading up on institutional childbirth. She stumbled upon a clean birth kit (CBK) while attending a tech event in Denver, US, promoted by the non-profit healthcare organization PATH. The kit had a plastic sheet, a Topaz blade, a piece of thread, a small square of soap, and a plastic coin. All this was wrapped in a box with instructions. She then travelled halfway across the world to Nepal, where a group of women was assembling the kit.
Unimpressed with the quality of the kit, she searched for more samples, but found none that matched her expectations. But she knew she was on to something, and started building her own improved version, using off-the-shelf components and assembling them.
By 2010, she had put together a rudimentary clean birthing kit called JANMA, which she tested in Bangalore, through her gynaecologist. The innovation won the Global Social Venture Competition for business plans at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad in March 2010, and followed it up by topping the Camino Real Venture Competition at the University of Texas at El Paso, US, later that month.
Zubaida Bai also received a 2010-11 fellowship related to maternal health from Ashoka, an organization which identifies and invests in social entrepreneurs. At one event, she met the who’s who of the world of maternal health. “They were folks who were shaping the future of maternal health. These are people I would have found impossible to meet, especially Wendy Graham, who does research on how clean birth kits prevent infections,” she says. Her interactions confirmed her belief that a product such as JANMA would have a market.
By 2011, they had sold 2,000-3,000 JANMA kits, priced at $2-5 (now around Rs.120-300), in India and had made some inroads into the US.
After the initial success, though, Zubaida Bai hit a wall. Ayzh needed funds for operating costs, scaling up and distribution channels. Forced to return to India after completing her course at the University of Colorado, Zubaida and Anwar had two MBAs and two children between them, and no jobs. Those were trying times.
Even as friends and family advised one of them to get a job, Zubaida and Anwar calculated that they needed $300,000 for one-and-a-half years for ayzh to get off the ground. A social impact firm assured them of $50,000 if they could raise $100,000 and $20,000 if they raised nothing. Everything hung in the balance till the end of 2012, when they were awarded the $80,000 Echoing Green fellowship. They also got a Canadian government grant for another $100,000, while an individual investor put in another $100,000.
This was the turning point. In 2013, they clocked $100,000 in revenue, and sold 50,000 kits in India, Haiti, Laos, Afghanistan and Africa.
The JANMA kit’s relevance is irrefutable. According to the UN, India’s maternal mortality ratio per 100,000 live births reduced by 65%, from 560 in 1990 to 190 in 2013. But that still means 50,000 women die every year in India while giving birth. Seventeen per cent of the women die from preventable infections. More than 300,000 infants in India die the day they are born, according to the report “Ending Newborn Deaths, Ensuring Every Baby Survives”, by the non-profit Save the Children and Joy Lawn, professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.
Zubaida’s goal for ayzh is three-pronged. She wants women to have power over their health by introducing new products for post-partum haemorrhage, a new-born kit, maternity pad and other innovations in reproductive health and family planning. Instead of creating products from scratch she wants to leverage the ayzh distribution platform to aggregate and sell products already available in the market. And, finally, she wants to launch an innovation lab for low-cost healthcare products, so that an entrepreneur with an idea does not have to go through the same grind that they did.
To realize this ambition they are currently in the process of raising $3 million in funding—a huge sum for a social enterprise selling low-cost products to bottom-of-the-pyramid customers—from social impact investors.
“We want to build a corporate entity, with a group of companies that will focus on women’s health and empowerment. Habib saw his mother struggle doing sewing and embroidery and I saw my mother struggle as well. They always brought in money, but were not appreciated and treated as an asset,” says Zubaida.
Nelson Vinod Moses is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist who writes on social entrepreneurship.
source: http://www.livemint.com / Live Mint & The Wall Street Journal / Home> Lounge> Business of Life> Indulge / Home – Leisure / by Nelson Vinod Moses / Saturday – August 09th, 2014
The War Memorial stands where the Cupid’s Bow used to be. / Photo: Vaishali R. Venkat / The Hindui
The Marina Beach is largely a late 19th/early 20th century phenomenon, caused by the expansion of the port. Till the 1870s, when harbour works began, the sea practically lapped the walls of Fort St George, barring a narrow promenade of sorts. This pathway extended southwards from the Fort and expanded into a circular space, a short distance before where the Cooum fell into the sea.
The roundabout became the spot where high society met, to converse, gossip, quarrel and much else. This was where romances were conducted, the lonely English officers and company servants courting young ladies who had been shipped out of England with strict instructions to find a suitable husband, or perish. There were occasional scandals too, such as when Warren Hastings romanced the married Baroness Imhoff or when Police Commissioner Edward Elliot wooed and later eloped with the wife of Colonel Napier. The place was soon christened Cupid’s Bow.
As the popularity of the spot grew, amenities were added. Ornamental lights and a bandstand came up. These regularly corroded with exposure to the salt-laden breeze and the Corporation of Madras records regularly report expense incurred in replacements and repairs. The Governor’s band performed each evening. The route from the Fort to Cupid’s Bow, now the southern end of Rajaji Salai, became Band Beach Road and that from the Island, now Flagstaff Road, was Band Practice Road. There was a strict dress code in force at Cupid’s Bow – men had to be in top hat and full formal morning dress, the dhoti no doubt not even a remote possibility. Women of course, were dressed at the height of then prevalent fashion.
Not everyone looked upon Cupid’s Bow with favour. In B.M. Croker’s 1892 novel, A Family Likeness, Nita Perry “a natural beauty of Madras” would walk all evening on Cupid’s Bow with her dog, “running the gauntlet of every carriage”, leaving her shy suitor to murderous thoughts. Lord Napier and Ettrick, the Governor of Madras in the 1860s, did not think much of it either. At the end of a particularly hot day, he was writing to his friend Madame Novikoff who was in far away Russia:
“The sun has just set. The world begins to breathe. I fancy that the musicians are just tuning their instruments at the bandstand. Round the bandstand there is a curved walk which is called Cupid’s Bow, but, alas! The god never draws it.” Interestingly, the roundabout was connected across the Cooum to the south by a bridge named after him. Its successor is still called Napier’s Bridge.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> Friday Review> Hidden Histories / by SriRam V / Chennai – August 08th, 2014
As the school guard rings the bell, children and teachers walk along the arcaded corridors and the school echoes with the now rare Anglo-Indian accent. St George’s Anglo Indian School will soon turn 300, just 75 years younger than Madras itself.
Considered the oldest school in South Asia, its seeds of the school were sown in 1715 as the Male Orphans’ Asylum, a home for the orphans of British soldiers. From the British’s ‘Black Town’, the school was shifted to the Egmore Railway Station in 1872, and finally established itself as the Civil Orphans’ Asylum in its present location on Poonamalle High Road in 1904.
Today, the orphanage building — Conway House – still stands, with the structure mostly unchanged but now painted a lime green. Most of the blocks in the school are single-storeyed red buildings with wooden windows and quaint, green painted grills. The school chapel that stands in the middle of a large, overgrown lawn appears straight out of an English village — a warm and homely exposed-brick building with steep tiled roofs and spires — the way it was in 1884.
“The orphanage now has 30 children, there were 300 when I joined,” says Isabel Manoharan, the oldest staff member of the school, who joined the school in 1976. “The Anglo-Indian community now has greatly reduced. Earlier the orphanage was open only to Anglo Indian children, and then we began taking children whose fathers were Anglo Indian, now we take them if one parent is an Anglo-Indian,” she says.
The orphanage students study in the school, which is government aided. “There are around 600 Anglo Indian students in the school today,” says N George, Headmaster of the school. The school provides midday meals to deserving students and the government aid helps in the fees of the Anglo-Indian students.
“We have been carrying forward the old traditions of the schools,” George says. One of the long standing traditions is hockey, and the school has a strong team that takes part in national and State level tournaments.
The tri-centenary celebrations are scheduled for April 2015 and the countdown has already begun, with events and competitions. “Alumni from across the globe are expected for the event,” says Isabel. The school will also be holding a carnival to join in celebrating Madras Day, with stalls, photo exhibitions and competitions.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Education> Student / by Archita Suryanarayanan / August 08th, 2014
Self-trained artist Manohar Devadoss reveals his secrets on perspective.
A few years ago I worked on a book of historic homes in Chennai. Sketches of the various residences accompanied the text. After the release of the book, an architect friend whose work I admire, met me and said that while the book was fine, some of the sketches lacked a sense of perspective. The conversation then turned to artists who in her view had the best sense of that. And she unhesitatingly placed Manohar Devadoss at the top of the list.
There are many lists on the top of which Manohar Devadoss would find himself; indeed if a compilation of the world’s most positive thinkers was ever made, he and his late wife Mahema would like Abou Ben Adhem lead all the rest. How else can you explain such joy of living despite her having been quadriplegic for over three decades and he having practically nil vision owing to retinitis pigmentosa?
Manohar is an accomplished artist, who despite failing vision, kept churning out some of the most amazing sketches of whatever took his fancy — pastoral scenes, the rocky landscape surrounding Madurai, temples, churches, people — one of my prized possessions is a sketch of a tribal girl that he did several years ago. For that matter, I treasure every note, letter or document that comes from Manohar, for it will have some drawing in it — a butterfly, a bamboo shoot or a star.
All of these sketches of his are marked by his flawless sense of perspective. The angle from which the artist has seen the object that is featured is as accurate as that of a camera. This is best seen in Manohar’s works on buildings, perhaps the finest compilation of which is his fourth book Multiple Facets of My Madurai. The work under review is his fifth.
From an Artist’s Perspective, sponsored by Ranvir Shah’s Prakriti Foundation, has Manohar revealing his secrets on perspective. A self-trained artist, he arrived at this knowledge not by reading books but through painstaking trial and error, the first awareness being kindled by seeing railway trains moving at high speeds even as he watched them from close by. The book is ideal for engineering students, draughtsmen, artists and amateurs wanting to draw. It combines theory with practice . How I wish text books in schools and colleges would have this fluidity and ability to capture our attention in full. The book is written in such a personal fashion that you can almost hear Manohar’s voice speaking to you through the lines of text.
It has usually been Manohar’s habit to declare at every book launch of his that this was his last work. And I have always predicted that there will soon be another. In any case most of his books go into multiple editions and this one should be no exception. I sincerely hope that engineering, architecture and art colleges of India make a beeline to purchase this book for their libraries or even better, make it a part of their course curriculum.
The book is available for sale exclusively from Manohar’s residence. Those interested can contact him at 044-24982484. The work is priced at Rs.280 and proceeds from the sale, as in all of Manohar’s works, go to charity.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books> Literary Review / SriRam V. / August 02nd, 2014
GH tops the country with the most number of cadaver donor transplants performed free of cost
On July 1, 27-year-old K. Ilavarasi, who donated one of her kidneys to her husband R. Kalairasan, became the 1,000 live donor of the renal transplant programme at Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital.
Four months ago, Kalaivarasan, who works as a gardener in Singapore, was diagnosed with high blood pressure and a kidney ailment.
“He was put on dialysis there, but the doctors told him to go to Chennai,” said Ilavarasi.
The couple, from Tiruvarur district, initially came to the hospital for dialysis, but when Ilavarasi was found to be a match, she decided to donate one of her kidneys.
Both husband and wife are doing well post surgery, said doctors at GH.
“Tamil Nadu is the first State in the country to offer free transplant services,” said dean R. Vimala, at a programme held on Tuesday to mark the hospital’s milestone.
N. Gopalakrishnan, head of the hospital’s nephrology department, said they had performed a total of 1,143 renal transplants since 1986, with 1,003 being live related donor transplants and 140 cadaver donor renal transplants.
“As it is World Organ Donation Day on August 6, we would like to create more awareness of organ donation,” he said.
The hospital topped the country with the most number of cadaver donor transplants performed free of cost, said Dr. Gopalakrishnan.
“We have even had 57 beneficiaries from other States, including Bihar and West Bengal, and three patients from Sri Lanka and Nepal,” said Dr. Gopalakrishnan.
The pre-transplant evaluation and post transplant follow-ups are also free, as are the expensive immunosuppressive medicines that patients have to take all their lives, he said.
The patients’ survival rate for the first year was 92 per cent, and for the third, 85 per cent, he said.
“It is difficult to follow up beyond that, as many beneficiaries are not from the city. But our longest surviving recipient is a man from Villupuram, who received a kidney in 1993,” he said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Chennai / by Staff Reporter / Chennai – August 06th, 2014
