Organ trade is illegal in India. But it is an open secret that patients requiring a kidney transplant, if they can afford it, buy kidneys from the economically distressed.

In Tamil Nadu’s Namakkal district, the decline of the textile industry has created conditions of economic distress, and organ brokers have come to exploit them. Startlingly, as we found, the network stretches all the way to Singapore.

Scroll’s Executive Editor Supriya Sharma, in this episode of True Story, speaks to reporter Johanna Deeksha who travelled to Namakkal to investigate the trade.