KOLKATA: The CID has unearthed a racket in which poor people from four Bengal districts “donated” their kidneys to patients in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.This comes close on the heels of the detective department unearthing another such racket where poor people from Punjab and Chhattisgarh were brought to the city for “donating” their kidneys in lieu of cash.Lalbazar detectives had found how the “poorest of the poor” from Punjab and Chhattisgarh were promised Rs 10,000-70,000 for a kidney and brought to Kolkata as donors using loopholes in organ transplantation laws. But in the latest case, CID sleuths at Bhawani Bhavan say they have traced several poor land tillers and daily wage earners in four Bengal districts who have ‘donated’ their kidneys for a price to patients from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. All these operations took place in some private hospitals close to EM Bypass.A fax sent to the Bengal home department by UP chief secretary Javed Osmani in April this year alerted the state to the racket, prompting the health department to launch a probe.CID officers were shocked by the questionable documents in each kidney transplant case that “certified” that the donor was a blood relation of the recipient. While Lalbazar officers suspected the veracity of the “clearances” from the ethics committees of states such as Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, CID officials claim the papers from the districts of Bengal — carrying signatures of senior health functionaries — are either forged or have been misused.The poorest of the poor in Bengal have been donating their kidneys to patients from UP and Rajasthan.The law says that a recipient has to advertise in a newspaper seeking a donor. If medical tests establish a match, the donor has to file an affidavit saying he knows the recipient. It has to be supported by a kin who files another affidavit saying the family has no objection to the transplant.“We have sent our officials to individual addresses and traced ‘donors’ in villages like Bindol in North Dinajpur — which is infamous as the kidney racket village — and in Bankura, Burdwan, Nadia and South 24-Parganas. We have also sent our officials to the health departments of these recipients’ states. In several cases, we found that they never ever had access to these files though the files returned to Kolkata duly stamped along with necessary signatures and clearances,” said a source in the CID.Around 40% of all kidney transplants done in the city involve financial transactions, say sources. Over the last few years, patients from UP, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand have been making a beeline to Kolkata for kidney transplants. A recent TOI report revealed that in Chhattisgarh, the largest number of ‘unrelated donors’ were from Bengal.