61,668 Indians wait for a kidney as transplants stay at one-fifth of need

Sixty-one thousand six hundred and sixty-eight people were on India’s kidney transplant waiting list on 9 February 2026, a parliamentary standing committee on health and family welfare has recorded. In 2024 the country completed 11,558 living-donor kidney transplants and 1,918 deceased-donor ones. The list was almost five times that annual total.

The committee’s report on chronic kidney disease was presented to the Lok Sabha on 7 August and is now being read in the papers. It asks the Centre to put kidney transplant units in at least three government medical colleges in every large state and in one college in every small state and Union Territory. It also wants timed targets for new organ-retrieval centres, with extra weight on hill and underserved districts.

Where the operations happen

Transplants cluster in Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka. Most district hospitals in a majority of states have no nephrologist, no dialysis technician and no urologist on the roster, the same panel found. In 20 states and Union Territories there is not a single dialysis technician in any district hospital. Many of those states have not even sanctioned the posts.

NOTTO data for 2019-23 show women were 63.8 percent of living organ donors and men were 69.8 percent of recipients. Living donors still account for about four in five of all organ transplants logged by NOTTO. For kidneys in 2025 the split was 12,491 living-donor operations against 1,986 deceased-donor ones.

The disease load behind the list

The panel was told that about 138 million people in India live with chronic kidney disease, the second-largest national burden in the world. About 2.2 lakh patients reach end-stage kidney disease each year. That inflow alone implies about 3.4 crore extra dialysis sessions a year, on top of sessions already booked. Dr Vivekanand Jha of the George Institute for Global Health India said the committee has now asked for the registry kidney doctors have wanted for years: monthly dialysis counts per patient, drop-out rates, transplant rates, deaths and reasons for stopping treatment.

A separate government track is an organ-swap registry with standard operating procedures, so incompatible family donors can be matched across hospitals instead of inside one theatre. Officials say about 20 percent of end-stage patients who have a willing relative still cannot donate because of blood group or immune mismatch. Mint reported that the national waitlist across organs sits between 89,839 and 100,000, with kidneys the large majority, and that true clinical need is higher because many patients never reach the NOTTO portal.

PMNDP pays for dialysis. Ayushman Bharat can pay for a transplant once a patient is already in hospital. Neither scheme builds a retrieval team in a district that has no nephrologist. The committee’s ratio is the one that will still be true next year unless those posts are filled: five people waiting for each kidney that was transplanted in 2024.