In his new three-part series for Five, Donal MacIntyre goes undercover with Five's first ever international investigative strand. With an imaginary million pounds to spend, Donal uses a different cover in each episode to infiltrate and expose gangs all around the world who take advantage of the poor and put us all at risk with their relentless pursuit of money.
 
Across the world, the trade in human organs is illegal - yet in India, it's alive and flourishing. In the first programme of the series, Donal goes on the trail of the surgeons who bribe the poor to sell their organs to the rich, and who even rip out body parts from the dead in the name of profit. Posing as a wealthy businessman who runs a medical company, Donal traps the body butchers as they carry out their grisly business, with hidden cameras catching every sordid scene on tape.
 
Donal claims to be the head of a company set up to acquire body parts.  He flies to Bangalore to meet three surgeons who he has heard might be interested in selling kidneys if the money is right. In India, as across much of the world, the law states that donors must be blood relatives and unpaid.

He meets two Nigerian patients described as brothers, but the donor, with his calloused feet, appears to be a manual worker and the recipient, who looks quite different, seems like a professional. Donal is sure this operation, carried out at a reputable hospital under the nose of a committee, is an illegal one.

But while operations must be cleared by an authorisation committee, often it isn't informed, and catching the surgeons in the act is the only way of preventing this scam.

While Bangalore is home to much medical corruption, Chennai - formerly Madras - is so bad it is known as ‘kidney city'. Incredible poverty and high levels of corruption mean that there are always people so desperate for money that they will give up their only marketable assets - their body parts. Worse is to come as Donal is introduced to a pathologist who boasts that he has access to most of the area's corpses, and what Donal experiences is that you can buy anything if you know the wrong people.

12 March 2003
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