Infertility on the Rise

India Today Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie on surrogacy

This week, the magazine gives you a break from the hurly-burly of politics which seems more of the same-the disruptions in Parliament, the careening economy, the tumbling rupee, the electoral posturing and sop-giving. We tell a very human story up close and personal from the bustling town of Anand. A town, halfway between Ahmedabad and Vadodara in the heart of central Gujarat, which has long been synonymous with India's cooperative milk industry. It houses the head office of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd, whose brand Amul sparked the White Revolution and continues to give India some of its most creative advertising through a chubby little 'butter girl' in a polka-dotted dress.

But Anand is now home to a different kind of cooperative cottage industry. It is fast emerging as an international destination for surrogate babies, and has so far provided childless parents from India and 34 other countries a chance to fulfil their aspirations. On August 5, a 28-year-old woman, now known as Surrogate No. 500, gave birth to a baby girl at Anand's Sat Kaival Hospital and Akanksha Infertility Clinic, inadvertently becoming a milestone that has come to define what the surrogacy boom is doing for women from the region. A single mother of two sons aged five and three, she earned Rs.2,000 a month doing housework. Being a surrogate for a couple from Lucknow has given her Rs.3 lakh now. "I can build my own house now," she says. Anand houses several others like her.