Organ-failure patients are being forced to let go the lifeline thrown by families of dead donors with the health department denying private hospitals permission to conduct cadaver transplant despite a gazette notification legalising it.

When Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences recently applied for a licence to carry out cadaver transplant, the health department wrote back saying that the guidelines for declaring a donor brain dead were “still under process”.

But health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra said there should be “no problem” in declaring a potential donor brain dead as long as it was done by the appropriate officials. “The gazette has been published and anybody wanting to perform cadaver transplant can go ahead,” he added.

So who are these “appropriate officials” authorised to give the go-ahead?

Two months ago, Soumen Sikdar (name changed) waited an entire day for them to arrive at Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals and officially declare his 24-year-old son brain dead so that his organs could save someone else’s life.

“It was the hardest decision of his life, and it went waste,” said Brojo Roy, the general secretary of Ganadarpan, a nodal agency for cadaver transplant.

“The doctors empowered by the state government to declare a person brain dead under the Transplantation of Human Organs Act were not available and those whom we approached said they did not have the health department’s permission to authorise a transplant,” Roy added.

The state government had issued the gazette notification on cadaver transplant in 2006.

The director of health services, Aniruddha Kar, said his department was refusing permission for cadaver transplant because the gazette notification “is yet to be enacted”.

But cardiac surgeon Kunal Sarkar, also the vice-president of RTIICS, insisted that the gazette clearly mentioned all the criteria for cadaver transplant. “The protocol for certifying brain stem death has been outlined. Even the names of doctors who would form the panel have been mentioned.”

Cadaver organs have to be transplanted within 24 hours of the donor being declared brain dead. “We are working with the government so that the procedural delays in cadaver transplant are overcome,” said Rupali Basu, the CEO of Apollo Gleneagles.