ruralindiaonline.org/article… A Facebook community and a WhatsApp group set Roshan Kule on the road from Chandrapur to Cambodia, via Kolkata. PARI investigates. The Minthur series by @journohardy : Part II – Organ Trafficking

“I was initially reluctant to sell my kidney. But when they started coming home frequently for vasuli [recovery] with weapons and sticks, we were all frightened. I started considering the option.”

One day in November 2023, he tapped the ‘join’ button (of the Kidney Donor Community group on Facebook). The Facebook group has since been taken down. Within a day, Roshan received a message asking him to join a WhatsApp group.

The administrator of the WhatsApp group was Himanshu Bharadwaj, Roshan’s handler. Roshan – a small farmer in debt – had been convinced to sell his kidney to pay off the loans.

Roshan told his family and neighbours that he was trying to find a job abroad as a computer operator. He received the tickets on his phone – a train ticket to Kolkata.

“I was not alone; there were 12 of us huddled in a room in Kolkata where they would run blood and other tests on us in a small pathology lab.”

The potential kidney donors were in Kolkata for about 10 days, and in Cambodia for about 20, where the men were taken to the Preah Ket Mealea Hospital, registered as a military facility within the government of Cambodia and a well-known medical centre.Their phones were taken away

“We were confined in small rooms with no exposure to the external world. Once our stitches dried, we were dispatched home by flight, through different routes, one by one.” For those two weeks, he could not contact his family.

In late March 2026, Chandrapur police filed a chargesheet before a sessions court. It runs into a few hundred pages, and is accompanied by 6,000 pages of documentary evidence.

The call detail records and WhatsApp conversations between the principal accused Sunchu, alias Dr. Krishna, and a consulting transplant surgeon named in the case are part of the evidence and run into several hundred pages.