Will donate bodies to PMCH: Sushil Kumar Modi, Sikkim governor

PATNA: Sikkim governor Ganga Prasad and state deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi, both hailing from Bihar, have decided to donate their bodies after death. They made the announcement on Sunday, saying they have already filled the resolution forms pledging to donate their bodies after death to Patna Medical College Hospital (PMCH). The cadavers will be used for medical studies there.
They made the announcement at a function organized at Vidyapati Bhavan by Dadhichi Dehdan Samiti to celebrate the International Organ Donation Day.
At the same function, Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced that he would also donate his eyes for transplant, while another Union minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey said that he had already pledged at an “ashram” in south India to donate his eyes to it. Health minister Mangal Pandey spoke on the significance of voluntary organ donation and need to popularize it.
The announcements made by Ganga Prasad and Modi came as a pleasant surprise. “In West Bengal, CM Jyoti Bosu, who remained the state’s longest serving CM till his death, had also donated his body. Similarly, BJP stalwart Nanaji Deshmukh had also done it,” Modi said.
He said he had pledged that after his death, his funeral should not be held, and instead, his body should be handed over to PMCH for studies.
Appealing to the people concerned, Modi said there is urgent need to make increased voluntary donation of organs, like eyes, lever, kidney and pancreas for their transplantation in the bodies of the needful. He said in West Bengal, 10 lakh persons had filled forms pledging to donate their organs.
In the same vein, Modi said eye bank units would be opened in all the nine government medical college hospitals of the state fully manned by trained manpower and motivator for organ donation around Dussehra festival this year. Each of the medical college hospitals have been given Rs 1.5 crore to make their respective eye bank fully functional as per the target date.
So far, successful transplant of 412 corneas and 54 kidneys have been made at Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences (IGIMS), Modi said, adding the plan is to make 1,000 successful cornea transplants at IGIMS over the next one year.