For some women, fertility is something to plan. You can freeze your eggs, delay parenthood, or schedule IVF around your career and life. The focus is on timing and choice. For many poor women, however, fertility isn’t something to plan. It’s something they are pushed to monetise. Their eggs become a source of income in an economy that leaves them with few other ways to survive. That is the reality, investigators say, that lies behind an egg donation racket uncovered in Maharashtra. Scamsters allegedly forced vulnerable women to undergo repeated egg retrieval procedures while others profited from their bodies.

What is the egg donation racket of Maharashtra?

In February, Badlapur police acted on a tip-off that women were being given hormone injections inside a residential flat. What looked like a minor health complaint turned into something far bigger and cruel. Eggs were being taken illegally from economically vulnerable women for years, repackaging them as “first-time donors,” and selling them on to fertility clinics and desperate couples.

Under India’s Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021, a woman is legally allowed to donate eggs only once in her lifetime. It’s a safeguard because repeated hormonal stimulation and egg retrieval carry many risks. As reported by The Indian Express, investigators allege that women who had already donated were issued forged Aadhaar cards and fabricated documents, so they could keep being presented to clinics as donors going through the process for the very first time.

A supply chain built on women’s health

The scale at which this racket was running is shocking and heartbreaking. According to The Indian Express, one of the women involved, referred to as Neeta Prasad, had undergone at least 45 egg retrieval procedures. Each procedure involved roughly two weeks of daily hormone injections, repeated ultrasounds, a trigger shot, and a sedated procedure in which doctors passed a needle through the vaginal wall to extract eggs from her ovaries.

Another donor, the report says, went through 35 retrievals over three years and was transported to clinics as far away as Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Two other women named in the report, Roshani Shaikh and Suman Patil, describe similar journeys. Both entered the racket after their husbands left them; both were drawn in by friends or colleagues already “earning good money” this way, and both kept going back despite cramps, bloating and exhaustion, because the cash kept their households afloat. Roshani said, “When I held ₹20,000 in my hand after every procedure, the pain my body had gone through suddenly felt very small,” as quoted by The Indian Express.

Police have booked 15 people in connection with the case under charges relating to human trafficking, forgery and violations of the ART Act. What emerged was an organised network of recruiters, middlemen, forgers, and clinics profiting from women’s bodies.

Who gets the profit and who pays the price?

The money trail explains why this machine kept running. According to the report, the racket paid donors between ₹20,000 and ₹35,000 per cycle, while it charged intended parents between ₹3 lakh and ₹5 lakh for donor eggs. Agents arranging the donors reportedly pocketed ₹70,000 to ₹1 lakh per case, with smaller cuts going to whoever handled the scans, medicines, and paperwork. Somewhere between a woman’s ovaries and a hopeful couple’s IVF cycle, a small ecosystem of middlemen was creaming off the value and taking none of the risk. That risk, doctors say, is not small.

Dr Anjali Malpani, founder-director of Malpani Infertility Clinic, told The Indian Express that this is the worst form of physical abuse. She further added, “A woman’s body is resilient. But calling the same woman back every month for hormonal injections, anaesthesia and egg retrieval takes a toll on her reproductive and hormonal systems.” She also pointed to the danger of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can be life-threatening.

Poverty makes fraud profitable

While this case may be new and shocking, at its core, the issue remains the same. Poverty pushes people into human-created hells. Poverty doesn’t hold anyone at gunpoint, but it narrows the choices until “no” stops being an option. ₹20,000 is not life-changing money for a fertility clinic or an intended parent paying lakhs for a donor egg. However, it is a month’s rent, a year’s school fees, a means for a woman to survive. That inequality between what the body is worth to the market and what the woman actually receives is the real scandal here, more than any forged Aadhaar card.

It’s worth asking who actually had the choice in this transaction. Not Neeta, Roshani or Suman, who returned again and again because the alternative was watching their households fall apart. The only people who ever had real choice in this chain were the ones at the top of it. They decided how much a woman’s ovaries were worth and how often they could be billed.

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