Surrogate motherhood helps infertility-afflicted, even homosexual, couples wanting to reproduce; it also helps Indian women earn additional income to better their lifestyles. It lets talented medical professionals to amass a fortune.

ONCE AN obscure small town in Charotar region of Gujarat, Anand has come to be regarded as the milk capital and the trigger of India's white revolution. The Amul dairy pioneered by two giants, Sardar Patel and Dr Verghese Kurien, has served as a model for all other states - and several countries too - in dairying. It has led to production of abundant volumes of milk to make people healthy and wealthy.

Not obvious at first sight, dairying is one vocation that is a great instrument of women empowerment. It puts the rural woman in an equal economic footing as her labour in this sector is no less valued, in contrast with other agricultural or occupations. The Amul experiment has transformed the region drastically and brought, apart from prosperity, a measure of gender equity. It now houses the trail blazing IRMA institute, National Dairy Development Board's (NDDB) nerve centre, Anand Agricultural University and the famous higher education hub at Vallabh Vidhyanagar.

There is another pioneering revolution that is sweeping Anand nowadays. Dozens of women of the region are pregnant, virtually renting their wombs. They are carrying babies not fathered by their spouses, and proudly so. It empowers them to be self-reliant and provide a better life to family members. Simultaneously, they are bringing happiness to others' lives - like in case of cattle farming!

Anand has become the most preferred destination for couples hailing from across the world, particularly those who are unable to conceive their offspring the 'normal' way. The emerging field of reproductive outsourcing is not much different from business process off shoring (BPO) everyone is familiar with. World's leading business houses have started outsourcing their back office chores to locations in India. Abundance of well-qualified and manageable white-collar labour, coupled with comparatively low wages, makes India cost-competitive and reliable.

At a time when exports of Indian agricultural and industrial products were stagnating, IT-enabled services sector has taken over as the major contributors to the country's economy. The cost of maintaining a bloated government bureaucracy and inefficient public sector enterprises is traditionally borne by farmers and manufacturers. As a result of crippling taxes, costs are at least 25 per cent higher. Apart from being too uncompetitive in the world market, goods from China and ASEAN countries have flooded even the domestic market.

Medical science has been identified as the next promising field in off shoring, where India has tremendous competitive advantage. India possesses a rare combination of low costs and thousands of highly skilled medical professionals and support staff. The major portion of costs of a medical procedure is from labour and not from inputs rendered too expensive due to heavy direct and indirect taxation. Moreover, modern electronic and bio-medical equipment are now within reach, thanks to eased import controls and downing of customs duties as demanded by WTO provisions. So, procedures, using state-of-art technology, can be performed in India at almost half the cost charged in developed countries.

Particularly in case of surrogate motherhood, Americans and Europeans, even those that can afford the cost of surrogacy in their own countries, prefer to come to India to nurture babies till their birth in Indian wombs. According to an Anand-based gynecologist and obstetrician Dr Naina Patel, most of her foreign clients admire Gujarati women. These females maintain a high standard of health and hygiene and are free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs. Never mind the lofty nationalists shedding tears for their dearest country that it has become a store for childless foreign couples to buy a child from! After all, blowhards of their ilk dub call-centre employees as 'cyber coolies'; yet, the BPO boom has revolutionised Indian economy, with its multiplier effects.

The overall cost of 'creating' a baby in Anand - airfares, hotels and medical care and the 'rent' for a womb -comes to approximately $30,000-40,000. About 25 per cent of this goes to the surrogate mom, which is more than the money she would have earned in three years. Take for example 32-year-old aayaa (helper to midwife) Kalpanaben (named changed) who was deserted by her husband after they had a boy ten years ago. After she got about Rs 5 lakh for volunteering as a surrogate, she is now able to send her son now to a good school. She has also bought a house and is willing to offer her womb once again to develop a foetus. Most surrogate moms use the money for giving better education to their biological children or to become self-employed.

Under the guidelines issued by the Indian Medical Council, informed consent is obtained from the surrogate mother to strip them of all claims to the child nurtured in her womb. When the baby is born, it gets only the name(s) of its genetic parents. Where the egg itself is donated by someone, the genetic mother does not figure in the documentation. In most cases, there is absolutely no interaction between the 'real' parents, egg donor and surrogate mother. However, the client may choose to contact the surrogate mom by mutual consent, based on unambiguous pre-agreed terms.

This type of a pragmatic approach to legal procedures enables the genetic parents take the infant with them and enter their home country without difficulty. The transaction helps infertility-afflicted, even homosexual, couples wanting to reproduce - an inherent nature-given urge in living beings; it also helps Indian women to derive some additional income to better their lifestyle; and it lets talented medical professionals to 'amass a fortune', which, after all, will help the economy flourish.

Courtesy: www.merinews.com, March 10, 2008