AIG Hospitals, Hyderabad, marked National Organ Donation Day on Monday by honouring the bereaved families of organ donors and highlighting the continuing gap between the number of patients awaiting transplants and the availability of donated organs in the country.

Speaking at the programme, AIG Hospitals chairman D. Nageshwar Reddy said around 20,000 organ transplants were performed in India in 2025, while nearly 90,000 patients were registered on the waiting list for major organs as of March 2026. “One person donating can save up to seven lives. India has made remarkable progress in transplantation, but the gap between the requirement for organs and their availability remains extremely wide,” Dr. Reddy said.

He added that medical expertise alone could not address the shortage of organs and called for greater public participation in cadaver organ donation.

As part of the programme, families which had consented to donate the organs of their deceased relatives were felicitated and presented with plaques in memory of the donors.

The programme also featured talks by specialists on liver, kidney, heart, lung, pancreas, eye and islet-cell transplantation. Specialists from Emergency Medicine and Critical Care discussed donor identification, brain-stem death certification, counselling of families and coordination involved in organ retrieval.